Mastodawn

I do all productive work at a desktop PC these days. I need keyboard, mouse and two big monitors. So I haven't bought a new laptop in ages. This one is 8 years old. I dug it out for serious tasks again now as I need something to hold my uni presentation with and while carrying a macMini around is viable its not ideal so let's try if I can make this old laptop worthy again.

Windows 10 was unusably slow from being full of accumulated junk from the past years so let's give Linux Mint a try again. Just booted from USB it feels really snappy.

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Mika on rails

13h ago

Continued the setup today. Was quick to get to what I need, playing back my presentation to an external display. "Just throw Linux on an old Laptop" still works if you just need stuff that plays in the browser. I'm sure more progress was made in GUI Linux otherwise too, but do I really want to use it on a big honking desktop machine? I think the answer remains "no" for me personally. I guess 80% of my computer time is browser based but the remaining 20% are things that afaik still rely on workarounds for Linux. And I just never got going with GIMP or Inkscape. They just don't click for me. So I'd instantly be at a loss with graphics editing.

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Mika on rails

13h ago

Also I completely forgot how "good" the speakers on this laptop are. They are not what you would expect from the looks. Okay and similarly the keyboard is pretty decent to type on. This was not an expensive laptop, the screen is probably where this is most evident.

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Mika on rails

13h ago

WOW DAMN I just sent the machine to standby or "suspend". Hit the power button again, login screen appears in under a second. Holy, I don't remember it being this fast.

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Mika on rails

Why didn't I do this earlier?
Okay I know why I didn't do this earlier. Because I would've needed to back up all the data of the existing Win 10 to somewhere else. I just circumvented this now by swapping in an unused 256 GB SSD where the original purpose for it disappeared.

Now as to why I didn't just buy a new SSD for the laptop a year ago to perform this exact swap back then already... I don't know. Perhaps because at the end of the day I was doing all my productive work at a Desktop PC anyway and was always able to cheese myself around having to bring my own machine to presentations because there was always some machine at the destination capable of playing back PDFs