Episode: 2562
Title: HPR2562: I bought a laptop
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2562/hpr2562.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:38:37

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This is HBR episode 2562 entitled, I Water Laptop.
It is hosted by Clacket and is about 22 minutes long and carries a clean flag, the summary
is, in which Clacket takes months or years.
To my laptop, but come out pretty pleased.
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Hi, I'm Clacket and I just bought a new laptop, so I've been looking for another laptop
for quite some time now.
In our home, we have my good old work MacBook from 2013, so it will work as a huge SSD.
And that's also where we watch our movies and things like that, it's a 15 inch model, I believe.
And then we have our old crappy computer that we bought for 2000 crowns back in 2013,
or something like that, it was slow even then, and it has been becoming comparatively slower
as the years have moved on.
So these days it's basically only I find it useful because I use it to hang in the console
a lot, use VI to do things, but still, if I do something as simple as just upgrading
all my next packages in my home directory, it will take a noticeable amount of time to
just figure out the dependencies and all that, which is like one second on the MacBook.
But so for some time I had been looking for a tinier laptop and also to go against the
mainstream a bit, I wanted a laptop that wasn't an X86 laptop, so it would be more difficult
to run Windows on it than it would be expected to come with Linux pre-installed.
So I was looking at the Pine Book, that seemed like a really cool laptop for some time.
And I registered for it, or I wanted the register for it, but it didn't have the size I wanted
at the time, I don't remember which size I wanted now, I think I wanted a 10 inch and
they only had a 13 inch.
And they didn't have that, so I waited for a while and then a couple of months later I
checked back in, okay, now they had, I think by that time I had decided I, okay, 10 inch
or 13 inch, there's really matters so much, maybe I want a 13 inch, and then I went into
looking, okay, now there's only the 10 inch available.
And I think I registered to stand in line for that model, but they still haven't got
back to me and I was like, sometime middle of last year, so I'm not sure if I successfully
registered or not.
And in the meantime, I've been working for a Swedish client and I had their laptop to
work on, so most of the time there was no resource conflict at home.
If I work, I work on my work laptop and my son wants to watch a movie or my wife needs
to work or serve to check something, they could use the MacBook.
But now I've left that client and I'm working for Fractalight and then I'm using my own
machine to work on.
So since January I've been looking around for a second, proper laptop, not just some
tiny thing, but something that can actually be, I could be doing real work on.
And so in Hong Kong there are two, there are three major change stores and two that are
available in any mall.
So they're suing Broadway and Fortress and Broadway and Fortress are the two ones that
are available everywhere.
So I went to Broadway and Fortress, Ubuntu stick in pocket and they kindly allowed me
to try out Ubuntu on all the machines that looked interesting to me.
I was looking for a laptop, 13 to 15 inch in the 4000 to 5000 Hong Kong dollars range.
There aren't many of those, most are more expensive, but there were a couple, so I tried
like five in the one store and five in the other and they all had problems.
The touchpad would stop working or not even start working or the screen would freeze
after a while or the kernel would panic after a couple of minutes of use or the wifi wouldn't
work.
So I didn't buy any laptop in January.
And then in April of course Ubuntu 1804 came out and it wasn't until then that I realized
that hey, I was bringing a two year old Ubuntu to the store.
Of course it didn't work with modern hardware because that's a rule of Linux support.
New stuff never supports Linux.
You need to wait for a while to allow the software to catch up.
So I figured yeah, I'll look into it and come with the latest Ubuntu at some point.
And now it came to the point where my son and I are going on a few weeks travel and my
wife will be left here so then we needed another proper laptop.
So I went out with the latest Ubuntu and I went to the same store as last time and the
guy even recognized me.
I guess they don't have too many of these troublesome Linux customers.
They want to reboot everything.
And I tried the two computers they had for around $4,000 and they both worked actually.
So I picked the one that had more ports even though the other one was lighter.
This one had more ports and space for a drive expansion and all that.
So that felt like a good choice.
I tried it out in the store and it managed to connect to the store Wi-Fi but it couldn't
connect to my phone.
And I looked around in the logs and oh this looks troublesome.
It says something about oh is this infrastructure mode or not and it seemed to be some conflict
of the oh no is there some specific driver you need for this that I'll never figure
out.
The guy in the store he said no no no it's probably just we have so many Wi-Fi's here.
He said troublesome radio environment and it'll probably work fine when you're home.
And I happen to have my MacBook with me and I've never actually run Ubuntu on this MacBook.
But I plugged in the steak in my MacBook and started it up in Ubuntu no problem.
Everything just works.
I had to go to the driver's section and juice proprietor driver to get the Wi-Fi to work.
And sure enough my MacBook also could connect to the store Wi-Fi and couldn't connect to
my phone.
So if you're okay maybe it's not a problem with this particular computer.
I didn't have the money on me at the time so I just put that computer aside to pick it
up later when I had the money and then on the way home on the bus.
I tried with my MacBook to connect to my phone again and then it just worked.
So then I felt more safe in my choice of mind this computer it will probably work once
I get out of that radio environment.
So here comes the detour the segue about the money because Fractalide pays me in cryptocurrency.
So I have all my stuff in a cryptocurrency wallet somewhere and if I want to move money
to the brick and mortar stores world I need to either go to the Bitcoin ATM downtown but
you can never know in advance if there's any money in it or not.
Or I would have to send my money to a local exchange and then transfer the money to the
bank from there or I could withdrawing cash from the exchange.
Tell them I need cash and then show up a day later and they will prepare the cash for me.
So yeah there's that whole side quest of actually getting money.
Actually when I was in the shop I assumed that I had money because I had transferred
money to myself a couple of days earlier for paying the rent.
So I just gave them my card and I said oh no there's no money.
So I asked them to hold the computer and I would come back maybe a day later or beginning
of next week.
And now it's the next week and I still didn't receive my money from the cryptocurrency
exchange so I'll have to get back to them about that.
So I just came back from my bank now luckily the company also has some cash in the bank
so I used that to pay the rent.
So that's that whole side quest about actually paying for this thing.
What we ended up doing in was my wife went to pick it up instead and used her credit
card to pay for it.
So now I've been playing up, I was staying up all night playing with this computer.
I installed a Ubuntu on it, no problem.
The only problems caused are by my own particular requirements on how things should be set up.
This time I tried using the XFS file system instead of my usual X4 or CIF.
The other the old bad laptop has an issue where even if I reboot it cleanly it will
still complain each time when it boots up that it needs to FSCK the root partition.
I don't know why but so this time I'm using XFS and just because and maybe I will not
run into that issue.
I'm guessing it might have something to do with but shouldn't have something to do with
me running ZFS with the ZFS auto mount for the slash next directory and maybe that doesn't
unmount in the proper order so that the disk isn't actually unmounted when the computer
shuts down but that seems weird.
If you can't unmount root should be able to remount it we don't we but I don't know.
Anyway this new machine.
I shrunk the Windows partition I'm going to remove it later but for the moment I just
shrunk it.
I don't want to remove it without having a backup of it.
Because this is a SSD 128GB so any space reclaimed is very valuable space and the resized
Windows partition is now like 50GB so there's a noticeable part of the disk.
I created a boot partition that is running X4 and then a locks partition of which I make
an LVM physical volume of which I make a volume group in which I create the logical
volumes swap 2GB the machine has 4GB of memory planning to upgrade it later if necessary
it depends what we're going to use this machine for.
4GB should be enough for Libro office and Firefox anyway.
Yeah so 2GB swap, 10GB root, 20GB flash nix and for that I'm using ZFS with ddub which
is really nice.
If you run geeks it automatically does hard link ddub all the time.
On nix you need to do it explicitly after the fact.
And instead of having to think about doing that I find it really nice to just use the
online ddub on ZFS and also if there's some software release that just changes slightly
if you files that should also ddub better with ZFS than with just whole file dduplication
as you get with hard link dduplication.
And originally I also set up ZFS because I put both geeks and nix on there and they should
have a lot of shared files that they wouldn't within their own ddub systems figure out.
So that was also very useful to use ZFS on but on this machine I'm not even installing
geeks because it is too troublesome to upgrade geeks these days.
Here's a performance problem it eats a gigabyte on memory and it takes forever.
So I'm going all nix at the moment until geeks figure out their problems.
So I'm running Ubuntu 1804 and I'm running nix on it.
And currently I'm trying to figure out how to get GNOME in Ubuntu to recognize my nix installed
ex applications.
I'm not even sure how I did that before.
I thought I had set ex ddubdata there's variable but I did that now and it didn't work.
So maybe what I did was I just simlinked the nix profile share applications files into
dot local share applications.
I don't know I'll see how I do it on the other laptop.
Oh yeah.
That's that's also the thing.
I tried to I didn't even succeed in setting the xdg data there's variable because I
said it in my dot profile but that is not run by the x session.
So I tried sourcing the dot profile from dot capital x session.
Nope.
Didn't do anything.
I tried the dot GNOME rc.
Still didn't do anything.
That worked on Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 but apparently not on Ubuntu 18.04 so I don't know what's
that all about.
I've been looking around a bit on the various stack exchanges and other places on the
internet but I haven't seen an answer.
I haven't even seen anyone have this problem on Ubuntu 18.04 specifically so I don't
know what to do about that but before until I can fix that I'll see if just putting
Simulings in dot local works.
I'll have to get this in order pretty soon because on Saturday we're flying, flying back
to Sweden to meet grandma grandpa.
That's going to be nice.
So I need this computer fix so my wife has something to work on.
So yeah this all about my laptop adventures maybe I should say that overall I'm very happy
with the computer so far.
There's always some stuff to complain about especially if you buy one for just $4,000
Hong Kong dollars.
I think it was $4,200 something in the end.
The power button is the upper right button within the normal keyboard area which is super
annoying because that's where the page down is supposed to be.
I really like it better when they put the power button outside the normal rectangle of
normal keys.
And also to make space for that they removed the end button and I discovered that actually
I used that especially to scroll on web pages.
So this in the upper right corner is just home page up page down power which is pretty stupid.
And also insert is important.
Use shift insert to paste from the selection buffer.
And insert is now function delete which is pretty stupid.
Pause and break they have their real key and I never used that.
So why couldn't they sacrifice that instead of sacrificing my dear insert key.
And of course always on on non Swedish keyboards the enter key is the wide enter key instead
of the tall enter key and I really don't like that either.
I prefer it to be the wide enter key.
But these are just nitpicks you always get used to these things.
At least the function key is not in the lower left.
The control is in the lower left and the function key is to the right of that.
That's how it's how it should be according to me.
On the MacBook it isn't like that but apparently I'm good used to that as well.
Touchpad is a bit clunky and it hasn't always responded so well.
Sometimes when I move I have to sort of rub all over it to make sure there's no static
and then it works again just pointing with my finger.
And it took me a while I didn't realize that right click didn't work by just going to the right side and clicking.
I thought it was some other problem but then finally I realized hey maybe I'm not actually right clicking right now.
And that was indeed the problem.
I looked online and I found that right okay some touch pads emulate right clicking by two finger clicking.
And turns out that that's what this one does.
And then I tried right three finger clicking and it turns out that's the middle mouse button.
So then maybe it doesn't matter so much that shift in search isn't so convenient anymore because I can just triple click instead
and then we'll do the same thing.
Now also after using this for a while what my usage pattern turns out to be.
But anyway I think for the price I got a better computer than I I dare hope for I'm pretty satisfied.
It's a bit heavy because it has the built-in DVD drive.
Most of the time that's completely useless but the MacBook doesn't have it of course.
And I bought an external DVD drive for that and when you want to watch a movie it's actually a little bit annoying to have to plug that in.
And this is mostly a desktop laptop is going to be here at home we're not going to lug it around very much.
So if it's two and a half kilos instead of one point seventy five kilos it doesn't really matter all that much.
And so that's my laptop purchase.
See you next time on hacker public radio.
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