So... I lost my patience. My Dell Latitude E6430 was running Fedora 36, but
nearly every update resulted in something breaking. Sometimes it was the kernel
causing issues, sometimes it was PipeWire blowing up, sometimes grub didn't
update and I had to reinstall it from a rescue environment. The last straw came
from a PipeWire update that effectively /lost/ all of my sound devices, and not
getting them back after rolling back.
So, I dropped about $100 on a 2008 MacBook Pro to properly replace the 2009
MacBook that broke a few weeks ago. I got the notification that it'll ship
tomorrow, but for the time being, I've pulled out my iMac to work from while I
wait.
I'll probably only spend another $20-$30 USD on it, as I've already got the
memory to fully upgrade it, two SSDs to replace the optical drive and HDD that
it ships with, and the charger from my MacBook. At most, I'll just need to
replace the battery, and I *might* buy a hard cover for it just because I want
to. Something that looks nice, even though I do like the aluminum body.
So, why'd I drop more money on Apple stuff instead of just getting a more
"Linux Friendly" laptop or something? Admittedly, I'm hitting a point mentally
where I just need stability with what I'm using, and modern Linux just isn't
cutting it there. PipeWire has been just as abused by distros as PulseAudio was
when that transition happened, GNOME is becoming more user-hostile by the
release, KDE is nice but updates break things a bit too often, systemd has
improved but now its creator works for Microsoft (which throws its future in a
bit of uncertainty for some people)... Just, there's too much going on, and
it's a bit too much for me.
With more vintage OSes like MacOS Snow Leopard, Windows XP, Windows 7, and so
on, I don't have to worry about all of that instability. I can just *use* my
device, and not deal with all of the crap that modern OSes put me through on a
daily basis. I mean, it's also why I enjoy the smol net stuff like Gopher, with
it being a /known quantity/ of sorts that barely changes. It "just works", as
they say. Plus, there's plenty of open source and free software that I can use,
update, and so on as needed that I can still have some modern features on such
an old OS, like modern TLS through squid proxy, or compiling some backported
patches into SeaMonkey or FireFox to have access to a bit more of the modern
web. Hell, people are still developing software for MacOS Tiger (10.4) on
PowerPC hardware, so I'm not alone in this.
Plus, it fits my personal needs. Don't really need more than that as a reason
to do something.
That said, I don't hate Linux. It just doesn't meet my needs right now.
I'll be uploading this to my SDF phlog once the MacBook comes in. I don't
have a way to connect to SDF set up on my iMac, and I'm wanting to be a bit
lazy right now.
