#Linux

TLDR

Buy it. Very few quibbles. Great linux laptop with a commitment to 100% repairable and upgradeable is impressive and future facing. I recommend the DIY version if you’re technical. You’ll love putting it together. Works great on Arch Linux 20211101 and above.

Preamble

My daily driver has been an M1 Macbook Air. It’s been a worthy successor to the 12” 2016 Macbook I adored. It’s light, powerful (the M1 chip is a wonder), quiet as it’s fanless, has a stunning display, good keyboard (despite critics), impressive battery life, quality speakers, and a solid webcam for WFH conf calls. It’s been an excellent machine to date. This is, perhaps unfairly, I high bar to meet when comparing Framework’s laptop against. Tough competition.

Rofi Org-mode TODOs is a simple script for use with the Rofi dmenu replacement to hotkey and then directly enter emacs org-mode TODOs and dispatch and append them to an inbox file. It’s simple, very fast, and designed to help you stay in flow while having ubiquitous collection of your TODOs for your GTD flow.

This first release in Python simply takes the text and tags from your input, formats the TODO in the proper format for emacs org-mode with a proper :DESCRIPTION: drawer with creation date, and appends in the proper format to your inbox file. Future versions will parse for notes, deadlines, or scheduled items, but this first version is functional and works right now. You can grab it here on Github

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.

I’ve been using an early 2016 Macbook 12" for 4 years now. It’s been a fantastic laptop and my biggest issue has been not being able to find another piece of hardware I like as much. I finally had to replace it with a maxed out Macbook Air as the closest substitute, but still missing the Macbook. I decided to put Linux on it to see if I might still be able to resurrect it as a daily driver.

With a Macbook 12" update unsighted in two years, and Apple releasing a revamped Macbook Air last year, I started considering whether my next laptop needed to be Linux. Surprisingly though, the issue became not so much Linux as the OS, as PC laptop hardware available. Early 2019, this is how I saw my options.

My trusty Macbook 12" 2016 has been a shockingly excellent laptop for my needs: ridiculously light (<1kg) with a bright retina screen and enough memory and storage to get everything I need done (8GB RAM and 512GB SSD respectively). Completely silent since it has no fan, and with the nice reliability side effect that comes from not a single moving part, my only complaints to date have been about battery life and a processor that could have been a tad punchier (though perhaps thermally incompatible with fanless cooling). I’ve been super happy with it (and do most processing heavy-lifting in the cloud anyway) so despite my initial worries about purchasing one in 2016, my complaints have been very few. More than three years with a laptop is a record. Laptops rarely survive 18 months under my cruelty.

SimplyMEPIS is a masterpiece of desktop usability. I have to say I am very impressed with it as a simple, immediately useful, and rock solid desktop Linux system that “just works.”

One of the reasons I switched to OSX was because I was constantly fiddling with Linux desktops on various distros and forever attempting to get them to work to the point where a lay person like my family members who are not computer literate could be installed and up and running with little difficulty. Until I’d encountered SimplyMEPIS it was like hunting the Grail.