Being in tech for a while, you jump a lot of ships either due to being bored or out of curiosity. My curiosity in computing devices started some 6-7 years ago .
At the time I had a HP laptop with 8 Gigs of RAM and 2 TB of hard drive. That thing I used throughout my college and I still have it alive and was using it actively (after adding 8 more Gigs of RAM and a much needed SSD) till few days ago. There is not a time in past 7 year, when this thing didn’t gave me a headache – being multiple battery failures, hinge issues, long boot time and finally only running when connected to power supply. There was also a small period when this thing become so slow(before ssd upgrade), that I just used it to remote login into my Hetzner box where I used Webtop docker image as my main PC/Server to do my daily stuff and internship work.
But to it I owe all my learning and explorations . Either it be exploring linux for the first time or being strictly aware of privacy and security aspect of tech.Underlying all of it was the hardware whose components were failing from first year of use.I am also somewhat to blame as my machine always remained in active state 18+ hrs a day on regular basis.
Having started with Linux in 2019, particularly Ubuntu 18.04 as my main OS, I never missed windows and had it completely wiped off from hard drive . My computer always had Virtualbox then, where there was multiple different flavors of linux for different purposes. I had Parrot for my security learning(I switched to manjaro later,and god it was painful: the pentesting packages experience on an arch based distro), Whonix/Tails for the privacy focused part and many other flavors.
There were some initial driver issues like wifi, bluetooth which I solved , but there were some which remained always broken on that hardware(microphone). The best part was that the machine was so usable with linux in it and that’s what it should have from beginning. I explored lot of things which would have been pain on windows and just like that I was windows free.
Then few years down the line I got to use Thinkpads(work pc) as my daily driver , which I combined with Manjaro and used it for around 1 year. This machine was flawless . A 14 inch portable beauty with awesome battery life(7-8+ hrs on average development tasks) and an AMD cpu which I can’t complain about.I certainly miss that machine. To me it was more beautiful than the HP or Dells I had seen/used.
After that I needed another machine as I didn’t had any functional computer and I bought ~ 1000$ MSI with good specs(RTX GPU with H series Intel). I had windows on it and after 4 years of not using it I wanted to give it a try just to save my PC from having 2 OSes as I had planned on some gaming . The experience was okay at first due to WSL, but degraded very fast when I learnt about memory leaks in docker + WSL system. I installed linux in dual boot and it worked like charm. Not a single driver issue.But then Hardware failed, hinge broke and I was without that pc for a month.
This was the first time I thought I SHOULD JUST HAVE BOUGHT A MAC. Inspite of my disdain towards Apple and it’s closed walled garden, they have quality and powerful hardware , which just don’t fail in 3 months.
For the next 1 year I again used my old HP with Pop OS for my work, it was slow when doing multiple parallel tasks,but still it worked out. I never again tried to install Linux on my MSI as I used that for my increased interest in gaming as I had very less storage there .In all these times I really missed the portability and battery life of Thinkpads.
So , I eventually purchased my first ever Macbook Air to replace my aging Linux HP.While I still don’t like Apple, the quality of the hardware mixed with battery life have impressed me a lot.I am still getting used to MacOs and as of today I still prefer linux, but hardware wise I can’t be more happy in this form factor.
So for this year , I plan to use my mac extensively for all tasks bar Gaming. I will always be on lookout for an Intel/AMD/ARM hardware with powerful iGPU(i love 780M) and with power efficiency of mac level. I will always be eager to come back to using Linux as my daily driver as I believe it is far more superior(I just need to find the best hardware for me).
This post came out of my boredom and I am tired now. I will soon be writing about my latest read Kurt Vonnnegut’s Player Piano . GoodBye for now.
Black as My Coffee 