Doesn’t Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I’ve always avoided it as I’ve had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn’t feasible for everyone.
Doesn’t Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I’ve always avoided it as I’ve had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn’t feasible for everyone.
Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It’s brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)
I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.
Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N
Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.
Motor Memory: Y <return>
Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N
Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!
Motor Memory: Y <return>
Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?
Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<
Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I’ve used with Fedora, but it’s an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple’s locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish… I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.
My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.
I use Lua for this sort of thing. Not my favorite language, but it works well for it. Easy to build for any system in the last 20-30 years, and probably the next 20 too. The executable is small so you can just redistribute it or stick it in version control.