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2022-03-28

Paring Down Computer Power

I'm handing my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon (8th gen) to the employer I'm currently leaving. I already have an old Asus x205TA that's been lying around unloved for a couple of years. As I expect my next employer, whichever that may be, to give me a new laptop I don't want to have two laptops lying around unused. Besides I really love that old thing. It's slow, of course, and I've had some very frustrating experiences with it for things that should be common use cases. Immense lag when scrolling through an .odt document that contains pictures, for example.

I'm looking forward to going back to it, and am currently trying to get the network working in Debian Bullseye. I chose the MATE desktop version and that brings back nostalgia from the early days of Ubuntu. It's going to be fun to experiment with what I can do given the constraints of the machine.

The major headache I expect is of course the bloated web experience. I might just try to get by with lynx as much as possible. For gemini I'll still use AV-98.

Somewhat ironically I put an Apple logo sticker in the smack middle of the lid back in the day, which has fooled a lot of people to think it's a MacBook Air at first glance.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal