Is this the year of Linux desktop?
I bought a ”new” laptop. (It’s actually second hand, 5 years old, worn out Lenovo.) I actually didn’t need a new laptop because I already have perfectly good 13” MacBook Pro from 2011 running #LinuxMint. And I’m using it mostly to test and play around with #Linux and to control my #homelab. But there was few things bothering me about the MBP. The display is pretty bad. I didn’t remember it was this bad back in the days. Also because of the old hardware it is strugling to play even 1080p Youtube videos I occasionaly want to watch. And for a change I would like to try to run Linux on more modern hardware instead of this more than a decade old laptop.
This Lenovo has much better display and more modern hardware so it has no problems playing 4k Youtube videos. But suprisingly the Lenovo trackpad is way worse than the old MBP’s trackpad. Also while the MBP is very old at this point, the aluminium unibody still looks better than the boring black Lenovo, which actually just looks identical to my work laptop.
I had choosen to run Linux Mint on the old MacBook, because it works out of the box. It even comes with all the neccesary drivers to get the MBP wifi to work. Not all distros are like that. Mint is very much usable right out of the box. You don’t need to tweak it to make it work. Though it looks and feels more lika a Windows, so I wanted to tweak it a little bit to make it more macOS like by adjusting few settings and installing a dock.
With the Lenovo I wanted to try #Fedora Linux, because it should work with Lenovo laptops right out of the box. And that is the case. I didn’t have any problems installing the Fedora. It comes with Gnome desktop which already is kind of macOS like. But I still wanted to make few small tweaks. I was suprised about the lack of settings to adjust the UI. For few small adjustments I had to install multiple extensions and an app. And what I’ve learned from the internet is that those extensions will probably break at the next major Fedora version update. Which there seems to be about every six months. So let’s see how long this will go.
I doubt this will be the year of Linux desktop. Even though there are distros like Mint which are pretty easy to use, it still might be too steep learning curve for your average computer user who might not know the difference between the internet and a browser.
~eva~
HomeLab Chanukah 
