the fashionable black brick accidentally labeled as thinkpad was bought more as a desperate dark joke against myself: the inner child always wanted to be a hacker, so i've gifted him with this hacky laptop on their 30-th birthday.
this machine was carefully kept away from by daytime-corporate-bullshit-job, and used mostly to have fun: writing silly kernel modules, playing with the kernel in qemu, rising the window manager, configuring nvim for many hours... typical weekend-linux-user workflow, you know.
this machine even had no russian keyboard layout installed, no messengers apps, no email client set up (not logged to a webmail either). only a terminal emulator with vim, and firefox, and the single-touch hotkey to switch between them.
there was a peroid of radicalization: every week i've been spending an evening or two to removing something from my computer: get rid of DE, no window decorations, no notifications, no status bar, multi-user.target by default. it appeared that two most impotant indicators - clock and battary level - fits nicely in tmux status bar.
i start liking this environment more than a coprorate macbook pro (which is an excellent piece of hardware by itself, indeed). you need something? go glue it up to your current setup using "man 5 glue" and a piece of plaintext somewhere in "~/.config/". you don't need something? just go systemctl disable --now it.
...and after about seven months, when i'm writing this, thinkpad has become my daily-driving machine. and the only thing from apple world i'm missing a log - notes.app. damn simple built-in notes app. after about 10 years with apple desktops, im so used to them: instant to launch, instant to sync, never lost a piece of texts because of this app. huh... but no more macbooks in a family!
let's back to linux: i'd like to just put it here - for a historical reasons, and a reasons of practice - the following specification of my workspace as of april 2025:
- thinkpad t14 gen1
- i7-10610u, 32gb ddr4
- pop_os 22.04, kernel 6.12.10
- x11, fluxbox in .zlogin
- firefox 137, nautilus, vlc
- ghostty 1.1.2, tmux 3.5a, nvim 0.11
this text was unironically formatted with <esc>ggVGgq.