My Linux Experience – Day Two

So here I sit in front of a new-to-me Thinkpad X1 Carbon from 2015. It’s running Linux. I spent yesterday wiping it of Windows 10 and installing Ubuntu 16.04.

The installation process wasn’t too bad. It was much better than I remember. I opted for Ubuntu because it seems like the easiest path to actually using Linux. I’m sure there are other options that I’ll want to try later. First things first.

I like the hardware. It’s just sort of solid and businesslike. It feels like something I can use and toss around without too much worry. This is partly due to only paying $300 for it, but it’s mostly because the thing feels like it could take a beating. The screen is nice. Not Retina MBP nice, but nice.

I have to admit that I don’t mind not feeling like Jony Ive is whispering in my ear every time I open it.

The ThinkPad’s keyboard took a minute to adapt to, but only a minute. I’ll tell you right now it’s miles more enjoyable to type on than my 2016 MBP. The keys have a lot of travel, and they inspire confidence. Oh, and there’s an actual Escape key, which I’ve missed.

Let’s talk about the trackpad. Something is wrong with the trackpad. Something must be wrong with it. Using the trackpad is the most frustrating, inaccurate, unpredictable thing. I’ll leave final judgment for later, because I assume there’s a fix out there. There has to be a fix or the whole machine is going to go sailing out a window soon.

I haven’t explored software much. I’ve got Emacs (Spacemacs) all set up. That took some finagling, as the bundled package was 24.3 or something and I needed 25.x. The package system and software installs are going to take some getting used to. I expected that. My email is all local via mbsync and viewed in Mu4e. At first I thought managing email in Emacs was a gimmick but it turns out to be pretty great.

Other than Emacs, right now it’s mostly just Firefox and a terminal. This machine isn’t intended to replace my Macs. It’s more of an experiment to see how far I can get. I’ll keep you posted.