I don’t really like laptops. I’ve owned four in total over the years:
- Some Toshiba hand-me-down from ~2002. I don’t remember too much about this bad boy. It had XP on it, probably a Pentium M, and maybe a low end discrete graphics chip? I was really happy to have it when I was 14.
- One day it got stuck in a boot loop, I think the thermal sensors got bugged. I got really mad at it (15 year old hormones and all), grabbed the power brick, and slammed it repeatedly into the chassis. RIP Lappy 1. The lesson I learned was more valuable that the laptop.
- A 2007 refurbished Dell Latitude. I still own this guy, and as far as I know it still runs. I think it has a modest core duo 2, 2 gigs of ram (maybe 4? I might have upgraded it), and some low end Quadro GPU. Latitudes are in the “business” line so it has a few nice features modern laptops tend to lack, like a tooless battery and drive swap, and a generally solid upgradable chassis (no dents this time).
- I took this laptop to college and pushed it pretty hard. I remember playing Left 4 Dead on this thing and it more or less working ok. I wrote a lot of music on it with Cubase 5. For a while it was the “Studio” machine in my dorm room, and I had a janky KVM switch to swap between it and my frankentower of a desktop.
- Relitively soon into school I bisected my tower into gaming and studio rigs. I bought a cheap smallish mATX case and stuffed it full of parts, and split the rest back into my beige mid-tower, serving as the “work” machine. With that, the Latitude started collecting dust, especcially since I had a second “laptop” I’ll talk about in a second.
- Later, around 2013, Lappy gained a new purpose. I was just getting seriously into a new project (XING) and learned about source control. Since we were using Unreal (UDK at the time!) Perforce was the provider du jour so we went with that. Of course, we needed a server… out came Lappy to the rescue. We ended up running P4 on that thing for four years! The screen gave out at some point but it kept trucking as a server long after that.
- My third laptop was a mint green EeePC 701 - yes, that computer. I adore this computer. I bought it second hand off the Something Awful market (YIKES) in 2008, and by all metrics it was a ridiculous little device. 700 mhz celeron processor, 512mb ram and four whole gb of solid storage.
- I daily drove this bad boy throughout college. I think the raw value prop of the machine brought me great joy, as well as the compute restriction.
- Lastly, I bought a laptop in 2019 for work with the idea that I was going to take it to GDC the next year and showcase my next game. That didn’t exactly go to plan.
- It is an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 GA502. 3rd gen Ryzen, GTX 1660 Max Q, 16 gb ram and 512 gb ssd.
- I have not had an amazing time with this laptop. There were numerous driver issues in windows early on - I got a bug where the CPU would lock to it’s lowest multiplier, pushing the repeatable Ryzen 7 to 300mhz. Fucking unusable. I fought it for a while, and eventually got a bios update that fixed it… I think? I had to get some garbage “Armory Crate” software to even download the bios update, and the whole experience just stank.
- Ergonomically I think 15 inch laptops just kinda suck. Too small to be comfy to use, too big to want to carry around.
For multiple reasons I’ve wanted to join in on the year of the Linux Desktop so I figure revitalizing this laptop might be a good canidate. I have a specific use case in mind (writing this blog, WLI online stuff) and all the software I use runs natively in Linux - let’s give it a go.
Kubuntu
OK, I do actually want to talk about my experience with Linux on this machine, but I am actually still only on day one of installing Kubuntu. I will go over my thought process though.
I’ve been using Debian on all of my headless Linux installs:
- Raspberry Pi Zero picture frame project
- VPS
- Virtual machine on my home server (Windows based host) for messing around
I wanted to keep all the machines similar so I could apply similar workflows between them, but I hesitated on installing Debian straight up on Lappy. I had read that laptops in general can still have issues with power management, multiple graphic cards, wifi etc running under linux, so I looked up what people had to say about my particular model.
I found that, at least 5 years ago, people had success running Ubuntu on this model. This doesn’t surprise me as I’m pretty sure Ubuntu continues to be the most popular desktop distro, and of course it is based on Debian. I elected to go with Kubuntu simply because I thought gnome is kinda ugly.
I had some trouble installing Kubuntu - mostly because the bios on this machine kinda sucks and didn’t want to save the boot order. I dual booted for flexibility.
After futzing with it for a bit I was finally greeted with the desktop. I honestly have not messed around with things too much, but it seems rather intuitive and easy on the eyes. So far it seems everything works right out the gate, though I am asking very little of it. Time to get this guy ready for web dev.
Github
Ok, so I thought it would be easy to clone the repo for the WLI site onto Lappy since I used GitHub. Well, it is easy, but there was quite a few gotchas I did not expect.
First off: permissions. Make sure you do NOT run any of the commands as sudo, other than installations. To clarify, don’t run any git or GH commands as sudo as it will make those folders owned by root, not your user. I know, this goes against the Linux noob’s mantra of “eh, if it doesn’t work just sudo it” but yeah, that was important. I installed VSCode via snap (actually used kubuntu’s “discover” app, but afaik it just runs snap) and thought the permission problems were because of snap, but nope, just sudo nonsense.
You can theoretically use regular ol git commands for github, but it really doesn’t want you to. They deprecated passwords of all things - IE you can’t just git clone (repoUrl) if it is private. It fails with an unhelpful error, so off to Google I went. Long story short, there are a couple of clunky ways to get this to work involving making tokens or setting up SSH, but don’t do that.
Instead, install “GH” - this is a command line helper program guy that kinda just does what you want.
gh auth login
It authenticates your entire machine sensibly (IE pushes a website code response. You enter it in, now your shit works)
gh repo clone "repoURL"
Run this instead of git clone. I guess it handles auth behind the scenes and it just works. Weird shit.
Once I got all that out of the way, I could finally open the folders up in VSCode and source control just worked along side permission stuff. I honestly don’t exactly know how VSCode links in with git and at the moment I’m ok with that.
Hugo Woes
Ah, but this is one last problem. I installed Hugo the same way as VSCode - with snap.
Don’t do that.
sudo apt install hugo
Hugo otherwise lacks permission do to anything. I will continue to try and beginners mind my way through Linux but man, permission stuff is rough.
Well, that’s it! I wrote this whole article on this laptop, and man all I want to do is go back to my desktop. Ah, but not because it has windows - simple because it has a 32 inch screen, a mouse and a proper keyboard. Perhaps I need a KVM…? Why even have the laptop then? Maybe I really do need to go to the coffee shop.