Free and Open Source Software

I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I'd ever be here again.

I quit my sysadmin job a little over 10 years ago to pursue a non-technical career (law school, now lawyer), and I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to keep up with all the changes being made in the Linux world: systemd, wayland, the rise of docker and containerization, etc. Eventually, by 2015, I basically gave up on Linux as my daily driver. Still, when I bought a new laptop in 2019, I made sure to pick the Macbook with the best Linux hardware support at the time (the 2017 13" Macbook Pro without the touchbar or any kind of security chip, aka the 14,1). Just in case I ever wanted to give Linux a try again.

When the reddit API/mod controversy was brewing this summer, I switched over to lemmy as my primary "forum," and subscribed to a bunch of communities. And because lemmy/kbin seemed to attract a lot of more tech-minded, and a little bit more anti-authoritarian/anti-corporate folks, the discussions in the threads started to normalize the regular use of Linux and other free/open source software as a daily driver.

So this week, I put together everything I needed to dual boot Linux and MacOS: boot/installation media for both MacOS and Linux, documentation specific to my Apple hardware, as well as the things that have changed since my last Linux laptop (EFI versus BIOS, systemd-boot versus grub2, iwd versus wpa-supplicant, Wayland versus X, etc.). I made a few mistakes along the way, but I managed to learn from them, fix a few misconfigured things, and now have a working Linux system!

I still have a bunch of things to fix on my to-do list: sound doesn't work (but there's a script that purports to fix that), suspend doesn't work (well, more accurately, I can't come back from suspend), text/icon size and scaling aren't 100% consistent on this high DPI screen, network discovery stuff doesn't work (I think I need to install zeroconf but I don't know what it is and intend to understand it before I actually install and configure it), I'd like a pretty bootloader splash screen, still have to configure bash (or another shell? do people still use bash?) the way I like it.

But my system works. I have a desktop environment with a working trackpad (including haptic feedback), hardware keys for volume (never mind sound doesn't actually work yet), screen brightness, and keyboard backlight brightness. I have networking. The battery life seems to be OK. Once I get comfortable with this as a daily driver, I might remove MacOS and dive right into a single OS on this device.

So thank you! Y'all are the best.