Upgrade to the little laptop

  I was thinking of purchasing a new laptop since I felt like my little trusty Acer is aging. Instead, I decided to upgrade it. It is after all out of warranty, so I got it an 8GB RAM Upgrade, and a 240GB SSD, well I have to say, it's a new experience. I put a fresh install of Manjaro Linux which I highly recommend.  I used GNOME as my Desktop Environment but recently switched to KDE.  I originally had Xfce, but it has a limitation that I couldn't find a workaround for, so I went with GNOME and I am now experimenting with KDE. I have to say, Plasma KDE is nice, and its memory footprint won't be a problem with 8GB of RAM.  The real bottleneck I some times hit is the CPU

About info below:
Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.17.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.64.0
Qt Version: 5.13.2
Kernel Version: 5.4.2-1-MANJARO
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 2 × Intel® Celeron® CPU N3050 @ 1.60GHz
Memory: 7,6 GiB of RAM







  I can't say I hit it often, but I noticed a few times :) I know it's not that hard, but for my home usage, I think I can live with it. My neighbor has an HP Laptop, with an Intel i3, 8GB, and SSD laptop. One day he asked me if he should upgrade, I just can't see why would a home user who uses the laptop for browsing Facebook, maybe watching Youtube would need a stronger machine?  I mean really, for those tasks you don't need a laptop a tablet would do the job just fine. I do know that he's using Windows 10, which explains why the machine feels slow and flimsy. I still don't understand or know why Windows machines manage to slow down over time. Every few years you should do a fresh install to keep it lean and fast.
  For example, I have my Desktop, which now uses Ubuntu 19.10 which was upgraded over the years from 15.04, that's 4 years of upgrades keep in mind that its full upgrades. I won't say that I don't see some problems, most likely from some manual tinkering that I did. I do prefer the Manjaro rolling release method, always fresh, and up to date. So far I have not run into issues with it. I did manage to mess up an Archlinux install, simply because the upgraded Kernel did not support my laptop screens brightness settings a few years back so I had a black screen :) a few hours later, I got it fixed thanks to the community, but I ditched it back then, switched to Antergos on one laptop, and Manjaro on another. Antergos is no more, so that laptop became an Archlinux, Manjaro though still runs on my main laptop. I am considering buying a 120GB or maybe even a small 64GB SSD for my desktop, and start fresh with Manjaro on it.
  Anyhow, I just wanted to share some thoughts, there you have it. I hope 2020 I will be more active "as I say every year" :)

dumped Windows10 and fully using Linux @home

  I have not used Windows 10 at home since this post in October 2017, and I do not miss much in from it.  One thing I do miss is the automated photo uploads to Amazon Drive, which I have also dumped, other than that there is nothing I miss from it.  I also did a photo shoot for a wedding in the family, and even my low end Acer R3-131T laptop dealt with it perfectly.

  I actually had high hopes for the continuous upgrades in Windows 10, but they proved to be illusions.  Ubuntu does better with full version upgrades than Windows 10 deals with it's rolling or continuous upgrades, not to mention OS's like Manjaro linux and Antergos linux where they are always fresh.
  Anyhow, it looks like it's always the case that I end up using linux on my home machines/laptops, there are no real good reasons for me to use Windows, since I do not play games which seem to be the only reason to have a Windows machine.
  For work, I'm getting a Mac OS, it's a better match since I can use Bash, and all the tools needed for my work are available on it.  It's a sable hardware and a matching OS that really just works.  There are times when I would say even a Linux laptop is efficient enough and even better than a windows machine (I've had to re-install my Windows 10 work laptop once because of some profile corruption), but you can't get Linux in an Enterprise environment, unfortunately.
 
  

Back to Linux? or not, not sure yet

  I'm really starting to get tired of Windows 10, and it's updates.  I thought I will give it a try, truth be told I bought a cheap hardware, with the option of being able to use it as a tablet since it has a touch screen, Acer 11.6". I've had it for less than 2 years.  The reason I got it was because I couldn't find a way to automatically sync to Amazon Drive, and Google Photo's. Well that didn't work out too well since the Amazon drive client pegged my underpowered CPU, and Amazon wasn't able to help. That was fine I found an alternative, but then Amazon decided to change their pricing plan, so now I lost trust in them. First they had the perfect plan at $12 which I started to use back in March 2015. Well Amazon decided to cancel that plan, and went with a unlimited storage either $79 or $59/year, which really didn't last that long as that plan was also canceled and now it's $59/year for 1 TB of storage.  While I know that it will take me another maybe 10 years to fill it up with pictures, what assurance do I have they won't change again? I'll just stick to SmugMug.  I've been using them for a while, but never thought of them as a backup service, they still offer a great unlimited photo's since 2009, so I trust they will stick to their plan, and honor what they offer.  Great organization possibilities, excellent sharing, and embedding options. Also another plus, they have integration with Amazon Drive, so I can transfer pictures from Amazon Drive to SmugMug.
  Anyhow, back to my rant about the laptop which was so sluggish and slow. I remember once waiting for more than an hour for a Windows update to finish. Not a re-install, but an update. Also surfing the net was becoming annoying, Chrome (I wouldn't dare start) Firefox was kinda OK, but still slow, click on a link and wait for the spinning hour.  My Internet connection is fine, as I tested with my desktop, tablet, and phone.
  I grabbed my old beaten Dell Insprion 1318 laptop, and installed Artengos Linux on it.  And started testing/playing with it, this old laptop was faster than my less than 2 year old one, though spec's wise, they are similar.(I'm actually typing this post on it)  So I grabbed the newer laptop, and tried another Linux distribution. Manjaro Linux live USB.  And it worked fast, browsing was lighting fast compared to browsing on Windows 10.  Is it the anti-virus software?  Well that's required, so un-installing that is not an option.  Background processes were keeping the CPU busy, that's fine, but sometimes to the stage that Firefox becomes un-responsive. And after a bit of digging, it was the windows updates.
  What I'm trying to decide on, is if I need windows10 at all.  I'm contemplating installing Manjaro Linux XFCE on the newer laptop, or Artengos Linux, both are Arch Linux derivatives, which I also used for some time, before I lent the laptop to a relative, for them I installed Ubuntu.
  I like Artengos Linux, works like a charm on this old laptop, even photo processing isn't a pain.  Photo editing software is abundant on Linux, some are great, others have a big learning curve (but they work)