You might want to double check whether the second drive is properly
connected, or the display manager will refuse to start. In this case
typing `exit' in the console should still let you log in, unless
it locks up for some reason. (Then you will have to reboot.)
Now that you are logged in, a few things to note:
* The mouse buttons do not work. Pinch the touchpad to click.
* The keyboard layout is a mixture of the US English, Japanese, and Teletype
33 keyboards. By the way, its key labels are German.
* If you need a modifier key, try sequentially going through tab, caps,
control, alt, super. Maybe you will find it.
* The only text editor on the computer is nvi. No, that's not `nvim'.
* Firefox works, but has scripting disabled, routes everything through
Tor and clears cookies on exit. Also, each new tab is opened in a
separate temporary container that routes through a different Tor
circuit.
As an alternative, we have w3m too.
A few things before using my Linux laptop with amdgraphics... If you want to shut the lid, or otherwise use sleep make sure it is powered off USB, if it is powered by the battery or the barrel jack it will wake up, but the screen won't - be prepared to his Alt-PrintScreen REISUB.
Get used to doing that multiple times a day, or it may be time to setup USB debugging and try and add some info to the bug report at...
It was on my 2015 Intel MacBook Pro when I last used it with Linux a couple years ago. I ended up disabling all lid triggers and just manually hibernating it when needed.
I believe linux 5.x kernel fixed a lot of these, or maybe it was something else, definetely something when i moved the mac air to ubuntu 20. Sleeps works like a charm.
I'm on the latest kernel (Arch btw) and I still have to manually "sleep" my Dell XPS 9500. To add insult to injury, it's not even "real" S3 sleep. It's Microsoft, "we want access to your machine 24/7" S1 sleep.
To be fair, I haven't spent much time in the last year messing with any of that. I do miss the days when I could shut the lid on my old Thinkpad, it'd sleep, and I'd open it a day later to an i3lock screen, and it would have only drained a percentage point.
(Cool. I've moved on from ergodox to lily58 and have a cst trackball.)
This last weekend I pulled out my 12 year old Thinkpad running custom qtile window manager to transfer old DV movies to mp4s. Sadly my muscle memory was mostly gone and I had to revert to gnome... (Hanging my head in shame.)
I quantum entangled some atoms in my brain with some atoms in each of the starlink satellite's networking gear and use that to respond to comments. Don't tell elon.
My old team used to buy donuts on computers that were left unattended and logged in, as a game to get people to lock their screens. Dvorak alone saved me a couple of times!
My whole computer is like this. I use sway/i3. On my home computer I don't use a login manager so you have to type "sway" to get something graphical. At that point you probably don't know the key combos to open a shell, much less a web browser. And, yes, I do use emacs...
My girlfriend simply calls my computer "broken".
One time my brother was in my study and I needed to shut down my computer. After bashing on the keyboard for ten seconds or so he commented "THAT is how you shut down your computer?!" It honestly hadn't even occurred to me it might seem weird from the outside.
I wouldn't have it any other way, though. Sure it's nice if a machine "just works", but machines don't just work. They are layers upon layers of complexity and if I have to understand them then I might as well interact with those layers directly.
Strongly disagree here on the "machines don't just work." 99% of the machines in my life just work for 99% of the tasks I throw at them. I spend an inordinate amount of time fixing/working-around the 1%, but directly interacting with the lowest layers is a massive waste of my very limited time.
My primary reason for not using Linux for my desktop is that when I connect a bluetooth device, headphones, a monitor, a keyboard or a mouse, when I want to run a GPU intensive application, or when I need to connect to a VPN and have my DNS requests correctly routed through the VPN it just works on Windows or MacOS.
I don't have the time or energy to work out those issues in a community supported environment where half the time the community support treats you like a half-witted imbecile for needing support and where the environment itself uses a CLI tool that my wife or kids can't use to manage the settings.
Ease of Use, Dev Tooling, or Cheap. Pick two. Linux is consistently harder to use. With WSL-2 I've found windows eases the dev tooling pain that existed a few years ago. A Mac is not cheap.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. I work with Linux which, you admit, does not "just work". Your Windows/Mac systems just work because you pay someone to make it work for you (you don't skip the latest bug/security fixes do you?) That's the same as taking your car to the garage. I take my car to the garage too. But with Linux, I am the garage.
> Sure it's nice if a machine "just works", but machines don't just work.
I want Linux to be great as a desktop, but I’ve given up. I use Windows (with WSL2 for a Linux dev environment) because it is not my experience that “machines don’t just work.” It’s just that _Linux_ doesn’t ;)
Windows doesn't just work either. You've invested years upon years of learning to make it work. If you had instead used Linux full time exclusively for over a decade like me you'd be able to make it work too.
MacOS doesn't work by design. It's by far the worst choice there is.
Nope, I’m pretty ambivalent about my OS… Used Linux professionally for several years, Mac OS for several and only recently switched back to Windows with the advent of WSL 2.
Having spent multiple years on all three I promise you that my experience does not bear out your assertion. And to point it out: I am more than capable of making Linux do most of the things I want it to (tar flags be damned) I just prefer the UX on MacOS or windows
> After bashing on the keyboard for ten seconds or so he commented "THAT is how you shut down your computer?!"
This is exactly why I love to use my Linux machine. When I have a thought, I simply command it to the computer in written language and it immediately obeys.
I don't have to figure out where Johnny Ive hid the toggle switch in an attempt to make things more minimal. In fact, I don't have to figure out where anything is hidden at all because everything is right there at my fingertips. I shutdown the computer by saying "shutdown". I lock it by saying "lock". I open firefox by simply typing "firefox". It's a simple system, but I love it.
These posts are really funny because its people like us who love contraptions, and people going "wow linux doesn't work huh"
yet I typically run weird systems(xmonad, arch) and they're infinitely more reliable after the initial couple hours of setup than my windows install.
My thinkpad with a 7 year old Antergos install and i3wm "just works", but without a hint of irony. Literally the only issue with the laptop happens equally in windows and linux, and that's the USB ports going to sleep and never waking up until reboot.
The big thing about playing around deeper in the system, is you can fix it relatively easy. It's like a 90s honda civic where you can step into the engine bay vs doing any kind of maintenance on a modern audi or bmw. Sure you can see the guts but if a bolt loosens on both, which one would you rather have to fix?
I'm similar, but `startx` to get to GUI, and dwm instead of i3/sway. My girlfriend is somewhat used to it, I've added some convenience scripts for her in rofi to switch keyboard layout and setup the screens. She still asks me to remind her how to access her menu though.
Spot on. “My life is a constant barrage of belligerently fielding foolish questions and foolish answers from comically ignorant children.” I wish I didn’t know quite so many guys for whom this is their main shtick.
I was this colleague to my first CTO, was amusing back then and I didn't get it. Today I do the same and my pinky loves me. I also use a US layout on Scandinavian keyboard, it's fun watching people scratch their heads.
A few things to know before stealing the laptop my work gave me that I still keep around on the off chance I need to check something on an old, near unusable machine - if there is something preventing it from working there is a little hole on the bottom of the laptop that you can cause a hard reset and restart by sticking a safety pin or toothpick inside.
I’ve got a Zenbook flip 13 OLED. I don’t worry about any of that suspend/hibernate stuff. It turns off the screen and, I’m pretty sure, the wireless interface when I close the lid. I think this is mostly Ubuntu default behavior, although I did some customization when I first got it.
Sitting idle, I get an estimate of ~12 hours of battery left right now (starting with 80%). This is why I don’t worry about hibernate; idle power consumption is low enough on modern hardware.
When I actually start working, it depends on what I’m doing; actively using wifi seems to bring me down to more like 5 hours remaining. I’m sure I could burn through the battery by cranking up the CPU, but the, it isn’t like Windows will somehow make the CPU consume less power in C0.
When I am travelling, I have limited charging capabilities and want to continue working wherever I left - even if I did not open the laptop for 2 days. That only leaves hibernation. I had a linux laptop that could do that reliable, but for whatever reasons, the newer models of different brands I tried always had hickups and this is unaccaptable for me. I want to work with my laptop, not work on my laptop.
Suspend seemed to work out-of-the-box. I’m not sure how long the battery would last in suspend; the 12 hours estimate was with the screen on and wifi on, just not actively in use.
I just set up hibernate; since I don’t care about hibernate, I didn’t set up my swap partition large enough. Using a swapfile instead is slightly trickier but still pretty trivial. The steps listed here worked fine: https://askubuntu.com/a/1367244
I don't think I had any linux references - the parent to mine had emacs and vim maybe that's what you were thinking of - at any rate being a crappy work computer it of course runs Windows. It's a Lenovo.
On an "old, near unusable machine"? Be happy if Windows doesn't run out of memory when opening the menu. There are Linux distributions that come packed with all the firmware you could want if that's your cup of tea. This is not a Windows vs Linux issue, but even so you can get a stripped down distribution to give old hardware new life.
“A few things to know before stealing my laptop and/or using my editor config.”