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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.

    On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.

    Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.

    Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn’t support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.



  • It mostly has to do with formatting things: sometimes I’ll go to a conference, and they want the slides put on their computer, and powerpoint might display differently than on my Linux laptop, or collaborating on Word documents, where formatting can be somewhat fragile. In the past few conferences though, I got by fine with my laptop, making a PDF of the slides as a backup… So I was confident that things will turn out okay before I pulled the plug.

















  • I’ve had it since 2016, so it’s close to 7 years now. I replaced the screen and battery on it, but it has been pretty solid. Actually, uptime is something that’s an advantage for self-repairable stuff: when the screen needed to be replaced, it still worked enough to use, which I did until the replacement arrived. Takes a minute to swap the screen and then it’s running again.

    I’m based in Germany so I only used it in the US when traveling. Maybe the 5 will be the one where they decide to cover the US officially? It seems like there’s more attention to repairability than there was 7 years ago…