Yeah, so all right, it was about time. Past due in fact. I needed a new computer.
Right?
Sort of.
I've been hammering on a Think Penguin laptop since September, 2014, and it won't last forever. I wish, but no, it won't.
I'm a believer in redundancy. I like to have a backup, and a second backup, and so that way when a failure comes along, I can switch to my first backup. But then I get nervous because I have only one backup left.
It's a thing.
First off, way back when, I bought a System76 Starling, a "netbook" as they were called in those days. It was fine. Slow but fine.
Once I got used to that I bought a "real" laptop from System76. After a year the battery was shot, and a few months later it began rebooting itself, or sometimes just simply switching itself off.
Possibly a RAM problem, but I was living in a place where it would have been awkward to try repairing it, so I bought a replacement from Think Penguin. The first time I switched it on, I had a good feeling, a really good feeling. Strange but true, and that feeling has not gone away in the eight-and-a-half years since.
I love this thing, but when I gave the Starling away (Slow, remember? And too tiny too.) I needed at least one backup, so I bought another System76 laptop. Fine, it's still fine, but aside from setting it up, I've never used it because the Think Penguin is so nice.
Problem Number Two: The new System76 kept switching over to battery power while I was trying to charge the battery. I had to fiddle with the power cord to get it reconnected to the AC line. Running it on straight AC was iffy, because it could just shut down entirely Eventually I caught on and realized that the AC adapter was bad, and shortly after that the adapter quit working entirely.
Well, that was Problem Number Two. Problem Number Three was that I had ordered this laptop with System76's Pop!_OS installed. Yeah, right.
The first time I powered up this laptop, I got a black screen. With a manufacturer-installed OS, the manufacturer's own. That was the desktop. A black screen. I remember that there was something way over on the left side of the screen. It may have been a black icon on the black screen, but anyway, it worked, though all it did was to open a terminal session.
There was no menu, no "buttons" no icons, nothing. And System76 had no online manual, and no one else did either. Beauty, eh?
So I downloaded a copy of Pop!_OS and installed it. Tried, anyway. I wanted to check it out, at least once, but it wouldn't install. No, really — the operating system made by System76 would not install on System76 hardware, so I grabbed a copy of Linux Mint (what I normally use anyway), and installed that. With out a hitch, or a hiccup, or anything. I installed Linux Mint cleanly and effortlessly and thoroughly and forever and IT JUST WORKS as they say. Always has.
Then I went back to using my Think Penguin. That was seven years ago. No problems since.
But I still had only one backup system, and then COVID and such-like and so on, and shortages, and I live way outside North America, so as soon as I could, just before a trip back there, I bought a new System76 Darter Pro with lots more RAM and lots more disk space, and brought it home with me.
Fine and dandy.
At least Pop!_OS worked (and I don't like it), and I haven't seen any hardware problems, but software has been a different issue.
Not horrible, but an issue.
First off, I wanted to see what LMDE was like. That's Linux Mint Debian Edition. But it wouldn't install.
Eventually, with only a tiny amount of fumbling "help" from System76 support, I figured out that the relatively "old" (in a vague sense of that word) software from Debian was not a match with the completely up-to-date sparkly new hardware from System76.
The rule is that, in the Linux world, older hardware is usually a good match with newer software, which is why people can use Linux on 20-year-old, 30-year-old computers. Which is nice, but my situation was backward from that. I was trying to run at least 2-year-old, maybe 3-year-old software, and it was just a pileup. Didn't work. The new laptop choked on it.
Linux Mint, regular edition to the rescue again. Installed just fine, works just fine, probably at least twice as good as LMDE anyway. Meh.
So that was that.
Then, WTF, hardware. All working OK but really?
The battery on this Darter Pro is not removable.
I use my laptops at least 99% of the time in my apartment, with the battery pulled, because (a) I don't need the battery, and (b) leaving the battery in all the time, having it maybe discharge a bit from time to time, and then recharge constantly, well that kills batteries. But no — I'm stuck. Can't remove the fucker.
And two USB ports, only two, one on each side. Only two.
Color me odd, but I use an external keyboard, a "Happy Hacking" keyboard, which I've been using since 1998. (Actually the very same piece of hardware that I bought in 1998.) And I can't use a "standard" keyboard any more, and don't want to anyway, but I have that keyboard, and a mouse, and also a couple of external drives that I use for daily backups, and having only two USB ports is awkward, but here I am. Two USB ports.
I now have a couple of USB "hubs" which help, but that means more desktop cable clutter. Another meh.
Overall I will not say that I am gloriously happy with System76 support, or System76 hardware, and not at all with System76's operating system. Too many problems with the hardware for me. Considering my age, I may never need another laptop, but if I do, I'll go elsewhere. System76 is not my pal.
They followed up by asking me what I thought of their support and I told them, and then they were not happy. Nurk. I'm not either. Go figure.
And though I can't figure out who to blame for the rest, I can say that the rest amounts to the only problems I should have had, in a way.
Problems? Yep — the usual: Different screen resolution, different screen color cast, fiddling with icons, icon sizes, system fonts, loading and configuring software that I use every day, tweaking this and that, downloading something I forgot, and so on.
Emacs has been a bitch.
I really wish that emacs had a more standard plugin system, so someone like me could just select from a menu the few things that I like and be done with it.
There is no doubt that being able to use emacs lisp to virtually rewrite and customize the hell out of exactly every aspect of emacs is crazy good, but I don't know emacs lisp and probably never will and anyway I just want to get a few things done, not enroll in a Ph.D. program to become a certified lisper and then forget it all because I don't use it all day every day.
I have spent weeks (a couple hours at at time) chasing down inscrutable error messages, only to learn the names of startlingly odd configuration variables, only to discover that I still need to fix a wholly different dependency over on the other side, around the back, hiding somewhere in the bushes, just in order to get the damn configuration to be accepted so damn emacs loads so I can do a thing or two, finally.
And the theme would not load, and the spell checker, and all the rest of the crap, and then one of my macros would not work, even though I have not changed it for years. That was fun.
Eventually (a commonly-used word recently, by me) I found that emacs set its "bookmarks" file to be read-only, so that then emacs could not itself write to that file. Yep. Try to figure that one out, folks.
The good news is that when I changed the bookmarks file to a "read-write" configuration, those problems went away. Poof.
When I start emacs, I still do get a message saying "Package cl is deprecated". Apparently no one knows what this means and never will find out, because complaints about this go back years, and no one able to express things in any intelligible human language has been able to either explain it or suggest a fix, in case there is a fix to suggest.
So here we are.
I ordered my System76 Darter Pro in July, 2022, was able to pick it up in November, 2022, and now it's April 2023 and I'm still trying to get it set up. Despite no longer having to work, and theoretically having unbearably empty stretches of time, most of those stretches are already taken, so getting this new laptop functioning has so far been too much like basic scientific research, plus some swearing, and the food around here makes me fart .
Yeah, well. At least I have something to keep me busy, and my Think Penguin laptop has not died yet, and no doubt (if anything unforeseen fails to materialize), then in another week or so I'll be able to switch over to my new Darter Pro and still have Think Penguin in the closet enjoying a nice retirement, but still able to save my sorry butt. Could be worse, right?
At least it isn't raining today.
Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@gmail.com
Me? Still growing up.
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