[Coda]

I mean, I'll be 38 later this month (as I said in the counting game: the number looks like big glasses and a droopy moustache!) but I've felt like I ought to be 25 years old since I was, like, 16.



I complained in the daily awful thread about my work laptop breaking, but as I mentioned there... there's a silver lining.

I never liked that laptop in the first place. Sure, the screen is beautiful and it's got the best trackpad on the market, and since it's for work the company paid for the fastest, most powerful hardware they could give me. But everything else about it... The last time Apple made a computer I actually liked was in 2015. Since then, they've neglected their developer tools, switched to a keyboard that stops working if it gets even a speck of dust in it, got rid of the Escape key and the F-keys in exchange for a stupid mini-touchscreen, got rid of the SD card slot and all of the USB Type A ports (at least it still has a headphone jack), and made changes to the operating system that don't make sense at all for someone that uses a computer the way I use it. Also it's a 15" laptop and to be completely honest I think it's just a little too big for my tastes.

But I said 2015, didn't I? Guess what laptop I had for myself before the company got me this one? A 13" 2015 MacBook Pro! The second-best keyboard Apple has ever made, an actual physical Escape key, the form factor I prefer, and a broader selection of ports. It's not without its flaws -- it only has one USB-A port and no USB-C ports, and since it's a 2015 model it's noticeably slower (though for what I'm doing right now it's not unusably slow) -- but by golly it avoids pissing me off at every turn!

And the best part?

It's not running macOS! It would be stupid to try running a version of macOS old enough to sidestep the complaints I have about the newer versions because lots of software doesn't support the old versions anymore, but I'm totally happy working on Linux. I can customize it to my heart's content, and as a software developer myself if there's something I don't like I can do something about it! I'm even working on my own desktop environment because none of the others I can find are quite do quite what I would like them to do. There are a couple that are close enough that I'd be fine using them if I had to -- but I don't have to settle!

Just today I finished building a program to let me connect to my work VPN where the servers are. I was truly baffled to discover that there wasn't anything out there already that would let me conveniently manage my VPN connection on Linux, but it wasn't terribly difficult or time-consuming to just make my own. Once I have some spare time (Trisphee's spring event has priority) I'll polish it up and publish it for other people to use.