I know there is all of this stuff flying around Red Hat right now and while there are mixed feelings about it I decided anyway to install Fedora 38 on my Lenovo Yoga laptop.
It's a handy little 12" laptop with a touchscreen and stores a pen in the case so I don't have to worry about something else to loose. The keyboard lives up to the Lenovo hype for comfortable keyboards and the trackpad feels precise.
This is in comparison to my 17" Dell Latitude that the keyboard is "meh" and the trackpad is ... well, not great. It isn't as comfortable to work on the laptop even though it has 5" more than the Lenovo. A mouse is essential for the Dell and the larger screen is handy for watching movies and videos, but even for that it is not as good as the older, previous Dell laptop that was running a Duo Core (this one runs an i7). If the keyboard wasn't broken, it may have been worth to swap the motherboard (and RAM) from the more powerful laptop to the more comfortable one (if that is feasible).
The laptop previously had an Ubuntu 22.04 installed on it which was working pretty well, including connecting via Bluetooth to a speaker and the keyboard & mouse. Unfortunately I did not give the root partition enough space, so it kept complaining. It did not help that I added a number of applications, mostly as Snaps, and that took a lot of space.😉
So I had to resize the partitions, naturally, before installing. That was a pain because the Fedora installer doesn't really do any of that well. I ended up. in the Live USB , to install gparted to resize the partitions while maintaining the files already present (at least in the /home partition). Eventually I got it installed and had to re-arrange the boot loading so that it loaded Fedora rather than drop me into a grub > prompt.
So now that it is installed, I need to think about how I want to use this laptop, in part so I don't install a ton of applications I will never use. Easiest if I do this by not installing anything until I need it.
Use case ideas:
- Browser and emails
- Consuming social media and multimedia
- Office-like productivity (usually Google Docs)
- Dungeons & Dragons notes
- Video editing
- Minecraft and other time-wasting games (not too intense)
- Managing Linux servers and network devices
- Zoom & etc. video meetings
- ... and doing it all from the luxury of the couch
The biggest drawback I have fund so far is that Linux does not suspend (Ubuntu or Fedora). If I tell it to suspend it will go to sleep an about 1-2 second(s) later it wakes up again. So it is not well suited for taking to a committee meeting or the like because I have to shutdown (so it doesn't overheat in the bag) and turn it on when I am there. It's not a killer, but that isn't kind to the battery life.
The other issue was fractional scaling. The 100% is too small, and 200% is just too big. Thankfully this is easily fixed by issuing the following command, and then re-opening Settings.
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']
"
Meanwhile I am going to hold off on the development environment for the moment, until I have a development server to work on, or a specific project in mind. This is something that will take up a lot of space and not really be utilized sufficiently to make setting it up and the memory usage worthwhile.
For development work, and as a baseline computer setup, I still have Windows available on my desktop. It gives me the advantage of the larger screen, keyboard and mouse (all of which can be shared with the laptop) and better graphic card for games. I have to keep in mind this, so that whatever the laptop does not use, he desktop is used for.
So, how do you use your computer?
