a day at the lake.

friday, june 16th, 2023.

The weather's been rainy with the occasional thunderstorm for the last couple of days, which has put a bit of a damper on my ability to commute to work by bicycle. However, today we had a bit of a reprieve and were able to spend the afternoon at Lake Tobesofkee. Lots of relaxing on the beach, a little splashing around, and the little one made sandcastles with Grandpa.

My partner's dad is visiting from out of town, so we took him out to a nice dinner to celebrate Father's Day afterwards. The weather has been gorgeous today— even waiting for a table on the restaurant's porch was a treat!

Tomorrow, we're planning on going to the museum and farmer's market. This weekend has been lovely and a great way to spend time with my partner's dad.

installing manjaro linux.

My Lenovo ThinkPad X250 has been running Ubuntu for a while, but Canonical's new snap package system has been bothering me a bit lately. I'm not quite certain why the apt repositories needed to be replaced, but only for some packages. And the packages have to be mounted like Mac OS X .dmg files or something? I don't know, it really feels like Canonical has jumped the shark.

At first, I tried installing Haiku. No dice— couldn't get the desktop to come up. It froze in the boot process and I really didn't feel like debugging that.

The main draw for using Ubuntu was ease-of-use. The installation usually goes quick and I can get from nothing to a usable system in an hour.

Anyway, after stumbling upon a Hackaday article about switching to Manjaro, I decided to give Manjaro a spin, myself.

I'm happy to report that the installation process was just as quick as Ubuntu's, and I had a working system in less than an hour & customized to my liking in three. Dropbox, Discord, radio, git accounts, all that jazz.

And there's the rub for a laptop— I don't want to think about getting it set up. I want it to do its job and get out of the way. For a server, I'm more inclined to do something pared back like OpenBSD. There's something to be said about having working Bluetooth and a nice GUI for joining WiFi networks, though!

So, yeah. I'm pretty happy with Manjaro linux so far.

Until next time, be well! :)