Tip of the Hat!

 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?

Linux to the Rescue

 Frequently, when things are not working quite right in Windows, on Linux things just work. Especially if there is corruption of a file or file system.

Recently Linux came to my rescue when Windows could not see the recent pictures on my wife's Nikon DSLR camera of my daughter's dance recital.

Windows would try to import the pictures when it is plugged in, but for an unknown reason would only open the folder of what it imported, and that folder was empty.  Cue panicked heart palpitations!

Cooler heads (mine) went to see if I could navigate to the camera's contents through the file manager. Luckily I could, and so verified the pictures were still there! Whew!  Time to copy the pictures off and manually put them where we want.  That's when things didn't work again.

I could take the entire folder, or individual pictures, and copy them (via right-click).  However, when I try to paste them anywhere in the computer, there is an error message about the device being "busy".  It was then I noticed that every few seconds the activity light on the camera would flash.

Verified that all of the files were being displayed and all activity with the camera's drive should be completed. Still the light blinked, like a slow heartbeat.

This is when I moved it over to my Linux laptop.  Plugging the SD card in, the file manager popped-up and the contents of the SD card showed right up.  I could navigate through the card or, more importantly, copy the entire directory onto my laptop's hard drive!

I didn't see any messages regarding the files or folder or drive being corrupted or questionable until I tried to eject the card.  To be safe I closed it all out, shut down the laptop and removed the SD card before booting up again.

Once it booted up again I made a copy on a USB Thumbdrive so the pictures can be copied over to my wife's desktop.  That all works an she could copy them wherever she wants them.

Meanwhile I used Shotwell on my Linux laptop to import all of the pictures and to sort / store them in my pre-defined structure (yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/).

This isn't the first time Linux has come to my rescue and could either work when Windows doesn't, or provide me with more information on what is going on and how to fix it.

Linux is not good for people with attention deficits, and also is perfect!

 I think Linux is not good for people with attention deficits. At the same time it is perfect for them as well.  The draw of so many choices can be overwhelming while at the same time there are so many choices that it can take years to go through even just a portion of choices!

I label it as "with attention deficits" because if I am ADHD, it is undiagnosed and I don't want to muddy the water with calling myself that if I really aren't. I feel it is better to only label when it can benefit or explain a person's actions but is thrown around way too casually these days.

Back in the 2000s, after 2003 when I installed my first Linux, all of the choices for distros, applications, languages and desktops made me feel like a kid in a candy store.  It was exciting to have everything available at my fingertips without having to pay hefty charges or limit myself to 90-day trials.  I was able to try things like setting up web servers and thin clients and routers with content filters.  

Without the financial expenditure or time limits I was able to try it, take my time to work through and break it to find out how it works and to walk away from it as long as I need for other priorities or until I can find inspiration or stumble across missing information that may work to help my situation.

"Linux provides freedom.  Problem is most people don't know what it is, or how to use it."

Linux has since moved, evolved and changed over the years, and for the better. I used to switch between distributions to see who would be the first to recognize my Wi-Fi card, or graphics card, or DVD burner, out of the box first (always a fun race between Fedora and Ubuntu at the time), now most distributions are able to handle my hardware (with the exception of one laptop's Broadcom wifi adapter ... ).

Now that it has achieved my initial goal for "being able to do everything I can do in Windows, in Linux" I am starting to expand that goal and to expand my programming and enterprise systems knowledge by setting up my home environment with relevant tools.

This is where Linux, and open source, comes in strong.  Having access to enterprise-level open source technologies I am able to explore settings at my speed (no trial periods), without expending (a lot of) money, if any, and usually with a large collection of online documentation when I need help.

I'm not the fastest learner, which is why trials don't work well with me, and I don't want to plunk down money on things that I don't know if they will work or not.  This leaves my biggest challenge is not Linux or Open Source, it is my own head and my own attention span.

I am such a wet noodle!

When it comes to computers I can be such a wet noodle at times and this usually gets me into trouble!

For the past 5 years or so I have been dabbling in Linux, and Linux offers some nice features which I have come to enjoy

1. The Desktop Environment, or GUI (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, whatever), is different than Windows or the Mac OS. Personally, both of those environments are rather "blah", and don't offer much to get excited over.
   
2. The package manager makes installing so easy and one-stop-shopping, the hard part is keeping from downloading everything under the sun! Practically everything you want to do, Linux has a program that does the equivalent.
   
3. Most open source programs are updated fairly frequently and these updates are available at no cost. So I don't have to shell out money-after-money to keep a program up-to-date with the latest features. Plus it usually involves one or two command lines or clicks of the mouse to check and install available updates to ALL of your system's programs, even the ones you don't realize you use because it is called by some other programs and this one is only on the back-side.
   

On the other hand, though, most of my experience in programming is based off of VB, which is probably the least portable language into the Linux world.

In my current job I will be dealing with .NET (VB.NET and ASP.NET) and they have already sent me to a number of classes to learn the .NET platform (VB.NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SQL Server and the MSF).

I look forward to getting some experience under my belt and with the availability of Visual Studio Express, I am able to also develop things in .NET at home (without forking over the $$$ for the full version of Visual Studio!) which will give me the chance to look into features and things that work may not be interested in.

At this stage, I need the help and "hand-holding" that Visual Studio provides, otherwise the Mono Project would give me the best of both worlds (.NET on Linux). Unfortunately their IDE, Monodevelop, isn't as polished or helpful as the Visual Studios are for new programmers, plus VB.NET and ASP.NET has not been strongly supported until recently which leaves more opportunities of something not working and not knowing if it is a short-coming of Mono or of my programming skills.

So for now, I lead a double-life. I live Windows to develop my experience with .NET programming (plus my wife is used to the Windows programs; Office, Photoshop, Publisher, etc.) and I use Linux for my "personal" computing.