Dholdrums

I switched jobs a few months ago, so I had to return my work laptop. It was an HP EliteBook 2560p.

The thing ran BSD very poorly due to bad/nonexistent support for HP's proprietary hardware. I probably would have kept at trying to get FreeBSD to run properly on it, but my work used Google Hangouts for pretty much everything, so I was relegated to using Ubuntu on it.

I'm not a terribly big fan of Ubuntu, but all I really need is a proper terminal (I use gnome-terminal with Inconsolata fonts), a good shell, and Firefox, and Ubuntu does the trick with in that department, so there you go.

My new job gave me a brand new shiny laptop. A Macbook Pro Retina 15. It's supposed to be the shiznit, according to all reports.

But I hate it it. It's Unix, but barely. I definitely dislike it more than Ubuntu. It's a huge monstrosity. I tried using MacPorts to make my environment BSD-like, but nothing worked. Part of the problem is that the new job doesn't allow us to keep a running workstation on our desk, so I don't really have a server at work to connect to, so it's very annoying. It's a powerful machine to be sure, but for the sort of work I do, I barely use 1% of its power.

Right now, I'm sort of managing by running a FreeBSD vmware instance on the laptop. Whenever the laptop is running, that is my "server".

But I've given work trying to get things right and resigned myself to this ghetto.

But at home, I refuse to use this MacBook for any of my work. So I went to Amazon and bought a used HP EliteBook 2560p. In retrospect, I probably should have looked at similar sized Thinkpads, but it was sort of an impulse buy. I got it for only $180.

My wife was horrified, but it works great for what I need it to do.

In case anyone decides to run BSD on it and wants to make it work, I sort of made some progress:

• In the BIOS, switch the hard drive to not use AHCI, use IDE instead
• in the installer, don't use GPT, use BSD labels instead
• to get X to run properly, put kern.vty=vt in loader.conf

I had to go on a long trip, so I reverted to using Ubuntu on it just have something useful running, but I will try to get it to work with BSD again soon.

I was once given a netbook, ca. 2009, in the golden age of netbooks.

It was a Dell mini 10v. My boss at the time wanted to upgrade to a larger screen laptop, so I got the netbook.

I thought I would hate it, the keyboard was much smaller than I was used to, and I initially hated the 10in screen.

I used it for 3 years and ended up loving it. Reasons:

• the fact that it was so small and light. It was a pleasure to carry it around in my messenger bag, it weight about 1300grams (2.9lb)
• I got used to the keyboard fairly quickly
• it ran Ubuntu (and later Ubuntu netbook remix); while Ubuntu isn't BSD, I prefer it over Windows/Mac OS
• best of all: it had Dell's equivalent of a retina display, the screen was ultra sharp and colorful

I never noticed it being slow. In fact, the only downside to it that I remember was that the screen (10.1 inches) was sometimes too small to view a page in Firefox. But I only noticed that sometimes.

It was work hardware, so I didn't pay for it myself, but the pricepoint ($300) was great as well.

But around 2010, the netbook market died. Mostly for two reason:

• newer versions of Windows couldn't handle the slower Intel atom processors and smaller screens of netbooks
• tablets came in and mostly supplanted the category

Dell discontinued it's mini line, and so did everyone else. The last time Asus made an Eee PC was in 2013, and it was dead for a few years before that.

A shame, a netbook would be perfect for me right now. I mostly just live in a terminal with Firefox running. That's about it.

But alas, everyone stopped making them. The closest thing I can find are 12.5" laptops. They are okay, but netbooks would be better.

Oh well.