Snowflake Challenge #8

[ratcreature]

Challenge #8: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, a gift of your time to the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

Well, this is depressing. I didn't accomplish anything beyond survival in 2021. Even my book reading declined by more than half compared to 2020, to 72 from 150 books. I guess that I managed to stick with posting my reading in the Wednesday Reading Meme for a while was something? Before my reading fell off a cliff that is.

I baked a lot of Christmas cookies that I gave as gifts throughout December?

And not that getting Linux to work on my new laptop went particularly well, but I am proud that I managed to get both Adobe Digital Editions and Kindle to run under Linux on my new laptop via various different layers of windows emulation and several days of tinkering (because they would not both work with just one kind), and I wrangled a kernel update outside the distribution update cycle to get my wireless network controller to work. Standby/sleep is still borked though.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Well, modern Linux distributions have gotten a lot better about working out of the box, but if you are unlucky and something doesn't work automatically it can get really finicky.

If you want to just try whether Linux will work on your computer, putting Ubuntu (or another user friendly distribution) on an USB stick and trying it out without installing anything is a good idea. If all your hardware and periphery (graphic tablets, printers, scanners, bluetooth speakers, whatever) works then, it's likely you will have a smooth permanent installation too. If it doesn't work, it's still likely that you can get it to work in a permanent installation, but you will likely have to tinker, and it can get very frustrating especially if you aren't familiar with Linux and don't enjoy making the workings of your computer a hobby in their own right.

[mesotablar]

Thanks for the info. I don't work with a lot of wireless peripherals or syncing with phones/tablets so I think I might come to less problems than most people. Though I will say tinkering with my computer workings is more of a dreaded task I learned the skill set for by trying to keep my old laptops alive - Hey, the 14 year old still gets the job done (sometimes)

[ratcreature]

You should then try it first on one of your older computers. Their hardware is likely better supported under Linux than the newest. Like, the problems I had with my wireless were because my new laptop used a relatively new chipset that wasn't supported in the kernel yet. It was in the later ones, but that wasn't the one in the stable long term support ubuntu (which I picked to not need distribution upgrades any time soon).

With much older laptops you might want to pick one of the more minimalist window managers for your GUI since the default ones can be somewhat of a resource hog to include fancy graphic effects and such.

[mesotablar]

Good to know, especially about being resource hogs. I like everything to be as light as possible because only my newest computer uses SSD and I've gotten used to the speed. I have a 7 year old laptop I can play around with...and I realise now that there is a 7 year gap in age between all my computer purchases!