I have been annoyed by youtube-ads for a long time.

I’ve been specifically annoyed by the fact that my TV is one generation too old to install a custom OS that allows a custom yt-app that eats ads.

I’ve been ragingly annoyed by the fact that there were pre- and post-roll ads and THREE midroll-ads in an eight-minutes-video.

Something had to be done.

The last time I have tried Linux before this recent adventure that will be the topic of this post was probably 15 years ago, during university. I have tried parallel operations on my desktop PC, and I have tried it on the netbook. It was horrible.

To expand a bit more on that: a primary use case of my computing devices is and has always been gaming. Way back when, WINE did exist, but it was mostly a “set everything up yourself, good luck”-approach. Steam? Dream on. The older the game the better the chance to somehow get it to work, by virtue of someone else having done it, but it was always an uphill battle. The elsewhere mentioned screen-size problem of my netbook also did not help.

I do not doubt that those of you who only ever used the internet, a text editor and programming languages would not have had that kind of problem. This is still a post about my lived experience, so shut it.

Why trying it again now? Because gesticulates vaguely to the overall situation I wanted to get away from Microsoft. And in the last few years the overall situation on Linux has been changing…

In which I will muse about the laptops of days present and past. Mostly to try and do this “collecting thoughts in a somewhat coordinated manner”, and to see if this works out to be a post of a length I had in my mind when making this plan or if this will be a three-sentence fluke.

I’ll not talk about the several work laptops I had over the years, those usually were Dell work-horses doing exactly what they were meant to do while running company-administrated Windows installations that usually also were doing what they were meant to, and usually saw use plugged into their respective docking stations anyway. Used on the road, or the rail, or other people’s living rooms, they also… just worked. I’d still not get one for myself, because I adore the tiny-ness of my current device, but more on that later.