It’s good to see you again, old friend. It’s been a while. Twenty-three years, you say? How come we managed to drift apart that far? I know, I know, I betrayed you. But my room was cold at night and Gentoo offered me the ability to keep on compiling. And then I betrayed GNU/Linux for FreeBSD. And then I switched the demon for the apple. I’ve been on an apple diet for so long now, I can barely remember the tux.
What is it you say? Oh, it’s openSUSE now. Sure, you’re a chameleon, you can take on any colour you’d like. Great to see it’s still green. I like green. How’s YaST doing these days? zypper? What’s that, no more rpm -i? That’s cool, it looks like you’ve made some progress! Let’s make a screenshot the proper nerdy way and do some uname -a | cowsay in a terminal! Oh, that’s no longer cool? fastfetch? So first zypper install fastfetch and then that command? Let’s try that:
My last experience with the Linux desktop was indeed about twenty years ago. Since 2012, I’ve been a macOS user. I’m no longer proud of it: I miss Linux and I think macOS is boring and full of bloat. Yet the rise of the Apple silicon made me buy another one in 2020, which is still the one I’m using right now. The hardware is amazing, the screen is amazing, and the weight and fanless features are amazing. But I still miss customisation features—the ability to truly make the desktop mine—and I stopped updating the OS as a protest to ever increasing bloatware. This laptop is still running Sonoma which is bad enough as it is.
I have no intentions to go out and buy another machine any time soon; this one’s still doing fine; but I did start to wonder. What if… I got a ThinkPad and installed Linux back onto it? Would the hardware match the high standards I’m accustomed to now? Would I still be able to make my way around the OS? I ran GNOME 2 and KDE 3 (and then got nerdy with Fvwm). I compiled my own Linux 2.6 kernel patches back when that was brand new. I have no idea what’s happening now. That’s not to say that I don’t touch Linux: I use it daily to host this website, to run the NAS at home, and in virtual containers. But that’s not the Linux Desktop Experience.
My main motivation for moving away from Linux was my frustration with endless configuration and compilation. Back in the day, hibernate didn’t just work out of the box, the fan speed had to be configured depending on the type of the laptop, nVidia drivers were a pain (still are), etc. Work and life started getting in the way: I no longer had endless seas of time on my hand to go nuts with Gentoo. With two young kids, that times has dwindled even more, so NixOS or even Arch is out of the question.
Being fed up with the crappy Windows 11 installation on my work laptop, I wiped that partition and remembered my old friend The European Chameleon. So here I am, testing the waters yet again. Thanks to Valve, Lutris is amazing. KDE Plasma feels mature (even though some configuration settings seem sluggish). I don’t want to dive into the rabbit hole of AwesomeWM (but I do). I don’t want to try and live without systemd or have to hurt my brain about X11 vs Wayland. I want the thing to “just work”. I want my chameleon to be an apple. A proper one, like a “back in the day” apple one.
I haven’t had the time to give openSUSE a proper trail. I’m mainly fighting my muscle memory with CMD versus that strange CTRL location which is somewhat diminished by Toshy that then doesn’t work well in combination with my Emacs configuration. What I did notice is that hibernation/suspend is still ugly: if I close the lid for a night without putting the laptop in true hibernate mode (with its dedicated swap partition), the battery drain is ridiculous, especially coming from a MacBook Air that I just jam shut and open up again a hundred times a day.
This made me realise I will probably have to give up on the hardware quality part if my next laptop is going to be a non-Apple one. Which I don’t really want to? Seb and I discussed which laptop to get when ours would break down. The Framework is an obvious one as are the System76 ones that specifically support Linux. Alex White’s everyday carry post made me realise the build quality of these is average at best. It’s going to be a painful experience migrating from that. I know Kev is happy with his Framework, but I’m not yet fully convinced. The fact that this HP EliteBook 6 G1a 16 work laptop’s screen and overall build quality is terrible is not helping either. The touchpad palm detection experience is horrible on KDE.
Let’s first give the chameleon another chance to see if on an OS level I could live without macOS and my usual mac-exclusive power tools. The ones I’ll miss the most might be Alfred and DEVONthink. My recent migration to do-everything-in-Emacs does make the transition a lot easier. I also moved from iTerm2 to Ghostty last year and am now trying out Kitty with the Fish shell. My RSS feed now lives inside my FreshRSS server making me less dependent on NetNewsWire.
Software-wise, I’m getting there. I’m sure I’ll get there.
But what about hardware-wise?
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