My wonderful aunt sent me a Dell Inspiron 9200 she bought years and years ago. It’s not new and it’s not very fast, but it has several advantages over the macbook I got in 2006 that is now held together with tape, courtesy of the TSA.
- It is not held together with tape.
- Tripping over the cord doesn’t lose all my work.
- It has a ginormous screen compared to my macbook, which is WONDERFUL for coding (and watching movies)
- The sound is pretty darn good for a laptop. I can eat popcorn and still hear dialogue.
- My aunt takes incredibly good care of her things, so it looks and feels brand new.
I have fallen in love with using a mac and thought it would be a fun project to make a hackintosh. But after a little research, I realized that the hardware makes it impossible. That was pretty disappointing, especially since I’d already covered the Dell symbol with an apple sticker. Now I’m a false advertiser.
One of the things I love so much about using a mac is that I don’t have to tinker to make things work, and I don’t have to do much maintenance to keep things working. But at one point I really did enjoy that aspect of using a computer and my idea of a fun afternoon was installing a new Linux distribution to play with. I kind of miss it. So, I figured this was an ideal time to jump back in. After all, it couldn’t take me longer to get Ubuntu running than it would to install 6 years of Windows XP updates.
Installing Linux today is far less painful than it was 5 years ago. I’d definitely recommend Ubuntu to moderately tech savvy people. I say ‘moderately tech savvy’ instead of ‘everyone’ because it does take a little more effort to get things going than a typical windows or mac install. You have to do some extra work to watch a DVD, for example. (Ubuntu tried to automate the process, but failed.) I spent more time in the terminal than I expected getting things like mp3s to play. And I still haven’t got the wireless working after a week of tinkering on and off.