This post was inspired by the fact that I am going to be traveling and I needed a new laptop.

I am not a “laptop” guy. I much prefer to use desktops, even though I do connect an external screen to my work Macbook and that kind of works okay. For home I like having a machine that is always on, and if I need to I can just ssh in or use rsync to get what I need off of it. I’m also not carrying around my life’s work in case the laptop gets stolen.

Usually when I travel I just carry my work laptop and an iPad. Any personal work that requires more can usually wait until I get home. However this trip is very long so I didn’t want to be without an actual laptop.

Being cheap frugal, my personal laptop was a 2013 Macbook Air given to me by some friends. It was fine for my needs. Plus I got all the Apple-y goodness of syncing my information through my iCloud account.

When it came to browsers, I’ve used Firefox and a Firefox sync account for much of the past few decades. I was happy with it. I considered running my own sync server but I trusted Mozilla with my data since in their FAQ they expressly stressed they wouldn’t sell it, and it was supposed to be encrypted.

Over that time I’ve gotten more and more disillusioned with the Mozilla Foundation. I relied on Thunderbird as a mail client for a long time, but they seem to have abandoned it. When I found out that Mitchell Baker, the chair of the Mozilla Foundation, was pulling in over US$6MM in compensation (as of the 2023 990 made available by the incredible ProPublica, an organization I financially support) that just seemed wrong to me. Now granted that compensation was from the “for profit” side of Mozilla but it is hard for me to understand the difference. Note that Mitchell is no longer involved with Mozilla but I don’t have any information on her replacement.

Now Mozilla has introduced a “Terms of Use” document which is very poorly written and it seems to indicate that they plan to mine user data in order to generate revenue. They have tried to clarify what the new terms mean but that doesn’t change the fact that they have removed the “we won’t sell your data” entry from the FAQ.

I switched to Safari.

Safari is not open source, but the only open source options are chromium or a Firefox fork, and I’m still stuck with not being able to easily sync in a trusted fashion. Forks will still have to rely on Mozilla to do the heavy lifting, as creating a browser is not inexpensive.

Recently I activated Advanced Data Protection on my iCloud account, which encrypts the data using personal keys so Apple (or Apple under a subpoena) can’t access it, but it still is able to be shared across my devices. This includes my Safari data.

Plus, being neck deep in the Apple ecosystem means I get cool things like when a site requests a verification code via text, Safari can automatically fill it in when it is received by my iPhone.

But, for some strange reason my 12 year old laptop can’t support the encryption (grin). No worries, while I really like the integration with iCloud I can live without it.

What I can’t live without is gpg-agent. The open source gpg-agent can integrate with tools like ssh to use your GPG key for authentication, and you can “chain” that authentication through to other servers. Also, now that I am using Hugo for my blogs I really like the ability to rsync the files easily.

I could not get gpg-agent and pinentry installed on my Macbook.

I used the amazing Homebrew project to build all of the required prerequisites, but I didn’t have Xcode installed. The current Xcode is not supported on that ancient laptop so I needed a older version, specifically 1.13.2. Of course one thing that Apple sucks at is making it easy for developers to work in the ecosystem, so you have to have an Apple Developer account to access non-current Xcode versions and I wasn’t about to install a random one off the Internet.

On a whim I logged in to my account to see if I could get it anyway, and it informed me that my developer access had expired. I had gotten that access via my old company, and it wouldn’t let me just buy it. Instead I was told to contact my friend Ben, who used to manage our Apple relationship, and of course Ben no longer works their either

Apple has just announced new M4 powered laptops, so I looked and a cheap one I would want would run about US$1300. There were two downsides to this. First it wouldn’t get to me in time for my trip, and second, I’m cheap frugal.

I’ve been married for over 30 years and one thing that keeps that relationship going is that we talk about major purchases, which in our case is anything over a couple hundred dollars. I was talking to Andrea about my dilemma and she asked: don’t you have something that could run Linux?

I should also point out that I married well.

I had a nifty little Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu edition sitting in the closet, so I got it out and loaded the latest version of Linux Mint. One nice thing about installing Linux on older hardware is that all of the weirdo features, like the touchscreen on the XPS, work out of the box. I learned the hard way that you often don’t want to buy the latest hardware on which to run Linux.

I had forgotten how much I like Mint, and it installed almost flawlessly. I say almost because it didn’t install the proprietary Broadcom driver for the WiFi. I may have missed that step in the process but I have a USB wired Ethernet connector that enabled me to add it after the fact.

I did have to do a little digging to get gpg-agent to work over ssh. This post was extremely helpful, as you basically have to disable similar functionality in X11 and Gnome before it will start to work.

I am still using Firefox as the default browser on Mint, but I’m not using sync. I may switch to chromium soon.

In fact, I’m writing this post using the same laptop. Once I’ve cleaned it up I’ll run it through Hugo and rsync it up to the server.

Using Mint again reminds me of what open source could have been. If all I needed was a desktop it would be my default, but modern personal tech is all about interoperability. I have a desktop, a mobile, a tablet and a watch, and they all work together very well. As long as Apple does its best to allow me to keep my data private, I’ll keep using it, but I’m more than happy to use this cute little Linux laptop while I’m on the road.