Laptop Conundrum
I have too many computers, yet seemingly not enough. My mom's laptop is dying. It's not a surprise given she uses it about 20 hours a day, and it's a few years old, but still, it sucks.
Last year, when it was down for service, I bought an HP laptop that she could use while hers was out getting fixed. I knew that she'd get the HP back when her Dell eventually died, but I didn't figure on becoming a little attached to the HP myself.
But I have. It's a nice piece of kit. It's the right size, has all my gen-z like stickers on the lid, and does a reasonable job of functioning as an editing rig for DaVinci Resolve.
But her laptop is dying and while it still has another two months on the extended support plan, getting Dell to actually do anything about what's going on with it seems to be impossible. They've updated the bios four times this month. That's their solution for everything. Getting them to look deeper hasn't been possible, and I'm at my wit's end.
So, she'll get my HP. Probably tomorrow. And I'll be in this situation where I have too many computers, yet no laptop.
The thing is, I really don't want to buy another laptop. I have told myself that buying stuff isn't good for me. I've blogged about it. And yet, I'm here at 2AM looking at used MacBook Pros on eBay.
I do need a computer I can edit videos on. Right now, my main rig can't do it. I mean, it can, but not with openSUSE on it. And I can't hop for another 41 days as I write this.
The ideal solution, would be to put Windows on my spare desktop for the next month and 10 days, and then hop to a distro on my main desktop that can run Resolve no problem. I can even put my 4070ti into my rig and that should increase my chances. That would save me money, and be the right way to go.
I really don't need an expensive laptop. If I want a laptop to replace the HP that's going to my mother, I can get a really cheap ThinkPad to mess around with (or, you know, I could just use the one I have in the closet).
In many ways, this blog post is to keep myself from pulling the trigger on one of those shiny MacBooks. As I write through this, I talk myself out of it more and more, which is what I need to do. Those things are needlessly expensive, can't run Linux, and aren't upgradable at all. Apple's laptops go against everything I proclaim to stand for.
So, I won't be buying one. Probably.
But they look so cool!
Fuck.
No, I won't be doing that. I'll do what I need to do with my secondary desktop (which I just installed Gentoo on the other night) and get that set up for editing. I might even dig out my KVM switch. In July, I'll go to a distro on my main rig that will run Resolve. What that distro will be, I don't know. I want it to be Gentoo, but I don't know how much luck I'll have with Resolve on there. My guess is very little. The problem is all the other distros that can run Resolve are boring.
Damn, I'm a whiny bitch tonight. Time to cut this off before I buy all of Apple's line-up and never use Linux again.
