I’ve done a lot of operating system switching over the past many months and not a whole lot of blogging. My question: Does this thing still work?

I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn’t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into my laptop operating system. I’m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won’t write itself, and the notes aren’t going to do it for me.

I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell. But I decided to press “pause.” I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.

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.

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.

My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop’s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I’ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I’m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it’s about time to cut my losses. The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through many upgrades between about 2013 and 2019.

I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is very well from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.