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Can I use a Linux-only Machine?
Today I start an adventure in seeing how much I can do with a Linux-only laptop. You’ll notice the title is not Can I only use a Linux machine? I know I can’t. OneDrive and AirDrop are too good to give up among other things. I would also not know how to convert my home recording studio to use it.
My 27″ iMac is capable of any task I would personally need. Video editing and mobile development are probably the most demanding things I do and the iMac handles it beautifully. For consumption of media or simple web browsing I have an iPad Air that I love. My son games on my Windows desktop, which I also use sometimes for certain tasks like using Excel.
The need arose, though, for the tasks in between the intensive and the trivial. While my iMac is comfortable and has a beautiful screen, I have to sit in my basement office to use it. My wife complains, and righteously so, that I spend too my time in my basement and away from family. It’s true, I could easily put off some of the simpler tasks where I would still need a computer to a laptop. Thus, I can sit with the fam while still getting stuff done.
So there was a need for a laptop. Initially, I thought about a Macbook Air M1; however, it was hard to justify the expense for something that was way more powerful than I needed. I just wanted something where I could write some blog posts and do some light-duty coding.
Instead of buying a new laptop, I decided I would re-purpose my old work laptop. A major benefit was that I already had it. This is an ancient Lenovo Thinkpad T430, which was okay on specs back in the day when it was new (~2010) and built like an absolute tank. It seriously has the most metal in its casing that I’ve ever seen. Simply closing the lid of it felt like shutting the door of a safe. For comparison, my old personal laptop, purchased in 2013, died just 6 years later. The T430 lives on.
I used it every day up until 2016 when my employer was purchased by a much larger company and new laptops were issued. Perhaps the new company had no use for the old ones, but we were never asked to return them. We were never told we could have them either, so employees just kept them as a dirty little secret – a little victory against the establishment.
I wanted to make it my own, but could not ask for support to remove the corporate stuff since we weren’t sure that we were allowed to have them. I was able to clean it up enough to make use of it and be sure no one could track my activities. However, it always remained an organization-owned computer.
Look a start menu and customizable background! It’s like Windows… except not. How do you take a screenshot with this?
I gave it to my son as his first computer, but he was not impressed with Windows 7 and it was forgotten about. I would change jobs, but keep this computer. Earlier this year, I heard through the grapevine that the company had shut down, so I knew for a fact no one was looking for this. Corporate ownership, however, couldn’t be taken over. Like a loyal dog, the laptop kept looking for its master even though he was long dead. It still ran Windows 7 and there was no way to get the license key to upgrade to a newer version.
This was a huge limitation as one of my primary purposes for this laptop was to code and I would not be able to use current versions of many tools and packages I need. To take it over, I’d have to install a new operating system from boot. Brand new Windows licenses are damn expensive and I was suspect that the older machine could handle the bloated Windows 10.
There had to be a better way? LINUX! Finally, I thought to install Linux on it straight from boot and completely get rid of Windows 7. In particular, I got the Linux Mint Cinnamon GUI. I could use new versions of things like NodeJS and not have to tax the CPU and memory with background tasks.
Furthermore, my comfort level with Linux is much higher than before. I have an unmanaged VPS running Ubuntu and I know how to do a lot of things. I want to get better and I figure the best way to get more familiar with Linux is to force myself to use it. Hence, my laptop is now Linux only.
So Linux Mint, here we go it’s you and me. I have high hopes. Plus, I get some developer cred, what’s wrong with that? This is my personal laptop now. We’ll see how it goes.