The 'New' Laptop as a Reminder of Why I Love GNU/Linux
SOME days ago we acquired a 'new' (used) laptop as a crucial machine broke down and needed a quick replacement. It was the machine that we write all our working text files to, as it gets backed up to external disk every morning. Repair was not possible and time was at the essence.
Buying (or rather, choosing) the 'new' machine took about 10 minutes, testing it at the shop took about 5 minutes, and putting Debian 12 on it was mostly a game of waiting and clicking, waiting and clicking, waiting and clicking for a few hours (not much user intervention required). I wrongly assumed it would "save time" to use an old Debian CD and then upgrade 'in place' a couple of times (about 6 long steps). Well, it worked, but it took a long time. Anyway, it turned out that over VGA port this machine hasn't the capacity to drive an external monitor at full resolution. Today I belatedly (more free time, slow news cycles) plugged in HDMI to overcome this issue and use full resolution. Passing all the data from the old machine took only minutes. Copying the home directory in its entirety meant that system settings were just 'inherited' from the files, so I just needed to add (with apt) several programs and I was ready to roll that same afternoon... as if almost nothing happened that day.
GNU/Linux is not necessarily very easy, but if you know what you're doing, then a Disaster Recovery (D-R) effort, as the old machine refused to even boot, is a breeze. The following day I could barely even remember that a machine had died. Another one was there in its place running all the same things. Recovery by replacement of damaged hardware was fast and smooth...
Love it or hate it, the UNIX or GNU/Linux philosophy of everything as a file (never mind small program; Microsoft's systemd attacks this mindset) is a time saver. It's miles better than the Windows way of doing things.
My wife and I now have 13 screens in our adjacent offices. Most of these are laptop screens and most of these laptops are Taiwanese. These laptops cost very little. Yes, you can run the latest distro with KDE on a £79 laptop. Best purchase made so far this year. █