the old laptop

This laptop is a Teclast F5. It has a 11.6″ touchpad display, a Celeron N4100 CPU, 8GB RAM, and a soldered-on 128GB SSD (not NVME). I’ve owner since at least 2018. It is not my daily driver. For that, I have a new ASUS with an i9 CPU, 32G RAM, and 2TB of disk space. I also have tons of issues with it because it video and other drivers not working 100% on Linux (and sometimes not on Windows either). This laptop, on the other hands, just works. I can’t game on it and while the screen is surprisingly sharp, you really don’t want to be looking at anything that small for a long time (that’s what she said). With that said, I don’t feel hampered by it. This isn’t a video editing system. It’s also not a photo editing system, though I don’t think I would feel burdened running darktable or The Gimp on in. I run a fully updated version of LibreWolf and Brave browser on it without any problems. I just have to keep in mind that memory limits are a real thing here.

Why did I turn it on today? I’m putting together a short (5-day) vacation in the spring where my wife and I will attempt to go with only carry-on luggage. She told me it won’t work because I always take way too much computer and camera stuff. Nope, not this time. My phone will be my camera and I can take the “little grey laptop” to save on space and weight.

What did I need to do to prepare it? I plugged it in because the battery was long past dead. I already had Debian 12 installed from the last time I used it. I just ran an sudo apt upgrade -y and it was ready to go.

Summary: There’s something really great about a simple solution that just works. I wish my much more expensive hardware was this easy to use.

       _,met$$$$$gg.          tux@jmini 
    ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.       ------------- 
  ,g$$P"     """Y$$.".        OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) x86_64 
 ,$$P'              `$$$.     Host: F5 
',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:   Kernel: 6.1.0-17-amd64 
`d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$    Uptime: 32 mins 
 $$P      d$'     ,    $$P    Packages: 1598 (dpkg) 
 $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'    Shell: bash 5.2.15 
 $$;      Y$b._   _,d$P'      Resolution: 1920x1080 
 Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'         WM: i3 
 `$$b      "-.__              Terminal: tilix 
  `Y$$                        CPU: Intel Celeron N4100 (4) @ 2.400GHz 
   `Y$$.                      GPU: Intel GeminiLake [UHD Graphics 600] 
     `$$b.                    Memory: 1732MiB / 7771MiB 
       `Y$$b.
          `"Y$b._                                     
              `"""