Not really, but I knocked my tripod
into my laptop, busting the screen and logic board in the process. For the past ~2 years, I’ve been primarily a one laptop person, using my MacBook for both work and pleasure. I have a large windows machine that mostly collects dust since try as I might, I can’t get used to developing on Windows and a Chromebook that I keep near my couch for things that I want a bigger screen than a phone, but its use has been lessened as I try to be screen free at home as much as possible.
With these two options, I decided that the Chromebook made more sense for me to use, primarily because it’s about 1/3 the weight of the windows machine. I wanted something more than just a basic shell I could ssh into other machines for though, so I used Crouton to return to developing on Linux for the first time in a few years.
Overall, switching back to Linux was easy. Since I normally develop on the command line and with Vim, all my dev tools were available to me. The only thing lacking was 1Password which meant I needed to manually enter passwords. As someone who has been using a password manager for a few years, it was a reminder of why people use bad passwords and use the same password everywhere. Manually entering 50+ character passwords is hard.
The only other areas of
issue for me were that High Five video calls didn’t work that I never got the wifi switcher to work in XFCE (I admittingly spent like 3 minutes on this), so I had to bounce back to Chrome whenever I needed to connect to a new WIFI. In many ways, going back to Linux was like returning to an old friend. It’s where I started to code.
Thankfully, I’ve been reunited with my
macbook and the screen is good as new. Despite it going in just needing some screen repairs, my hard drive needed to be whipped. So I’m thankful for having backups of everything important, though I’m regretting not having pushed a few branches in git.
Let this serve as a reminder: Laptops are not invincible, backup your data.