Posts from August 2018

  • Ubuntu on my laptop... again

    0 min read

    After adding a Windows VM to the mix, to support the few things I need to do with that OS, I’ve found I’m actually seriously considering completely wiping Windows from this laptop and doing a single boot Ubuntu environment!

    This is a genuinely surprising development. I never expected Ubuntu to work so darn well on this machine, but it’s pretty close to flawless. Heck, I recently had this machine plugged into my work corporate network, and the thing auto-discovered and set up the network printers without any direct intervention from me.

    Mind == blown.

    Meanwhile, Windows 10 in Virtualbox, while not the most high-performance environment in the world, is a perfectly suitable environment for Skype, Webex, Outlook, and any other little Windows dependencies I might encounter.

    Honestly, I feel like after many years in the wilderness, I’m coming home once again. Linux is just a far more familiar, comfortable environment for me. I didn’t realize how much I missed it!

  • Random Updates

    1 min read

    So, first of all, Ubuntu on my Carbon continues to rock pretty hard. I’m genuinely impressed! To date, the only issues keeping me from going 100% Ubuntu all the time were work related:

    • We use Skype for Business
    • Webex on Linux basically sucks (at my company where we haven’t had the web app enabled yet)
    • Outlook Web App is fantastic… until you want to book a meeting, and then it basically sucks.
      • Oh, plus it does have some weird authoring glitches that are a bit of a PITA.

    But for personal use, it’s been a total champ!

    Fortunately, I’ve also found the obvious solution to the above issues (and one I’m sure many others employ): a Windows VM.

    In particular, Windows 10 + VirtualBox is a perfectly capable solution for the aforementioned issues. Heck, even my Bluetooth headset and laptop camera work (in the case of the latter, it straight up works in vbox, and in the case of the former it looks like just another audio input/output device attached to the VM)!

    And since the use cases are so modest, I can throw a measly 4GB of the total 16GB on this thing at Windows and everything runs pretty darn smoothly.

    Not bad at all!

    Oh, and also I decided to throw a little brutalism on this website for kicks. Enjoy!