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Mike Kreuzer

January countdown - 9

5 January 2024

On with the January project. Step two, shifting all of my badly organised code off my beloved Linux box & on to my old MacBook. Reluctantly. The year of Linux on the the desktop looks like it's going to have been last year for me. At least for a while. My eldest is showing a lot more need for the hardware than I am, & I've had this Mac sitting around doing almost nothing for a while now, so I'm go to slum it here for a while. Mac, the povo option.

9. That took a lot longer than I thought it would. I have one of the last Intel chipped Macs, with the T2 security chip that stymied other OSes for ages, & after trying half a dozen Linux installs with it I gave up & went with MacOS. Power management doesn't work with any of the Linux distros I tried, the box starts & stops randomly. None of them support the graphics card. It's all a non starter.

So far it's been a bit of a speed run of all the things that drove me off MacOS & onto Linux in the first place. An almost complete dependence on Homebrew (literally almost everything depends on it, even Bash if you want an open shell, & the original developer left to work on crypto scams). Projects change their names but completely balls up the migration process (RTX changed its name to Mise). Installs that I have to go into the innards of to add symbolic links to make them work at all (GPG with Sourcetree). That dumb thing where I can't open the terminal from a Finder window, that's still a thing apparently. Underpowered shortcuts as an automation tool. But worst of all, no possibility of escaping back to Linux. Trapped. And that's all just this week.

What was it Phil Schiller said about people with five year old Windows machines? That it was sad? Oh well, I'll make the best of a bad thing. This Mac's only three years old!