#Howto

TLDR

The 2020 14" LG Gram laptop is a surprisingly great, trouble-free Linux laptop to use as a daily driver and worthy replacement to a Macbook Air or Pro. It’s lighter, quieter, and seems more performant than comparable Macbook Air’s or Pros for such a slim machine, has a ridiculously long battery life, and a gorgeous screen. It has yet to overheat despite a lot of heavy lifting genomics, software engineering, and data science heavy lifting (unlike my Macbook Air). When the fans do spin up, they are very quiet. Virtually no downsides to this machine and I have to admit it’s a worthy and cheaper replacement for a Macbook Air which I wish I’d risked buying earlier. I don’t understand why more professional reviewers in the Linux community are not pointing at this machine. Details below.

The command line still provides vastly more power and flexibility than GUIs for numerous tasks. Comfort on the command line is often one of the things that distinguishes great engineers and data scientists I know.

I’m often shocked when I look at other peoples’ desktops and see a bazillion icons in their docks and taskbars. A GUI app for every conceivable eventuality. Many of them, just shiny wrappers around very simple programs. This contrasts rather sharply with my own minmalist philosophy which has been as simple as three program icons in the Dock: Finder, iTerm, and Firefox (and in Solus, just Firefox since Guake is tucked out of the way, see below.).

I’ve been using this hosting setup for three years now to make my blog fast, cheap, secure, SEO-friendly, and using commodity cloud resources to host it. This is the HOWTO.

I have to admit to being impressed with sites that load with preternatural quickness and a bit judgey about technical influencers whose sites take forever to load. Sure, devs are not designers and backend guys are generally not great at frontend optimization, but I still find it the littlest bit inexcusable. Add loading slow to not using https, broken links/images, or a site not being mobile responsive, and well… I think that’s borderline sloppy.