I love a quiet laptop
I love a quiet laptop with no hard drives or fans spinning. It’s easy to get there with an SSD and Linux.
Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step
I’m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15.
Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need.
I’m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn’t ready right away, I’ll still be able to work.
Ruby gtk3 GUI applications ARE cross-platform
I’ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I’ve veered between Tk for Ruby or Python, JavaFX and Qt.
I recently stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby, and I’ve been going through a couple of tutorials in an attempt to figure it out.
Since I’m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I’d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you could run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I’d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.
Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn’t expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking
I don’t know how much of it is Debian 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I’ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.
And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn’t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.