This post will receive updates.

Recently i’ve had the opportunity to retool my lab and my day-to-day devices and workflow, spend what you want kind of budget but I’d like to very much be thoughtful and make sure i’m purchasing with the goal of not upgrading again for another decade. For the larger part of the last decade my main setup has consisted of 3 laptops (two of those macbooks), 1 thinkpad P52s and one 1U hosted at Akamai for compiling. At the end of the day most work is done on the macbooks/1u (email, office, diagraming, writing code through Warp (terminal of choice at the moment)) and my p52s was keeping up to date with the Linux desktop ecosystem. It’s been a while since driving my day-to-day via Linux desktop but wanted to try and switch it up a bit as the latest changes to the Mac UI interface and ecosystem are getting a bit obtuse for me. Not a fan of the glass interface and trying to keep track of all the different daemons and changes affecting my opensource and custom apps, scripts, configuration, etc is becoming a nuisance. However, this constant upgrading of my laptops to what are newer versions of essentially the same thing for speed or memory increases that aren’t readily relevant to me seems extremely wasteful. 128gb of memory in a laptop to train local LLM’s seems silly when you can just spin up a compute instance when required. Even in the case where that would make sense for the life of the machine you’re still looking at 99% idle cpu/ram for most people, and even then a desktop mini-itx form factor machine would be much more cost effective in almost every regard.

Input, peripheral and driving wise, i’ve been using a custom wasdkeyboard v2 (defunct) with cherry mx clear switches and a Logitech MX Master 2S. My monitor is a BenQ RD320UA 32" 4k display set to 3840x2160 (16:9) configuration @ 60Hz. One monitor, multiple virtual desktops and round-robin between the laptops as required. For phone/sms, i’m using an iPhone 13 pro max and airpods pro noise canceling headphones.

I’m looking to replace most of this gear, primarily the macbooks but also upgrading the long-in-tooth p52s. Even though i’m using it right this very minute to type this post. The BenQ is great so that doesn’t need changing right now, even though I wish it had a higher refresh rate, most of the work i’m doing is obviously text. If that changes i’ll like just get another BenQ at the same size with higher refresh rate. The MX Master 2s is just as good as the MX Master 3s/4 so nothing really to change there. The keyboard I would love to upgrade but i’m seemingly going to have to build my own custom keyboard. I’d like QMK firmware, hot swappable switches, bluetooth/wireless /multidevice support. Cliff wrote some firmware for v2 of the Code keyboard but it’s not compatible with my board. Wasdkeyboards is out of business or at least not making keyboards and the keyboards on the market are 60-65% in size. I’m unclear on this fad or how anyone is actually using tiling window managers with those keyboards but here we are in 2025 where you can only get a little more than half of a full keyboard with mediocre cheap switches at the cost of hundreds of dollars.

Even though’s aren’t good enough so I started the process in trying to replace the my linux laptop with a laptop specifically for Linux but that didn’t come from the Clevo parts bin or that I would have to put up with backporting or trying to reverse engineer drivers to get a fingerprint reader working. This exercise got exactly one laptop I was interested in and that was the Starfighter from starlab systems, pre-ordered it I believe late 2021. 2023 had rolled around and eventually canceled that order (to my knowledge no one has ever received a Starfighter from starlabs) and decided to purchase a Framework 16 when it became available but of course the pre-order to wait option wasn’t in the cards at that point and I was on the fence about purchasing yet another pre-order. That and I didn’t want to waste time in having to get things setup, now I have the time.

The other thing that was of concern was the desktop environment. It’s hard to hate Apple for designing a thoughtful desktop interface and environment. It’s been usually consistent and easy to use, and works as expected. I’m not a *nix die-hard that will complain about things like systemd but a lot of those design choices like launchd for OS X have lead to a consistent and stable system that can still be modified through plist and slight modification where necessary. That said Gnome is where I left, and so have returned. It’s much better than before but some of these design choices are very odd. For instance, not being able to simply create a launcher for an application through the interface. One needs to read the Freedesktop .desktop entry specification, create a .desktop file then run desktop-file-install, then run an update-desktop-database to create a launcher? Seems like a new user wouldn’t truly understand that and those that do will not necessarily want to have to do that for applications they’d like to launch. Further the AppStore, may or may not have the flatpak/snap application version one wants to use or multiple versions might be necessary for whatever reason. If i’m a new user, i’m deeply confused, if i’m a seasoned user i’m deeply annoyed. This goes for the default choices on other things and a lack of thumbnailers via Nautilus including navigation in general. No more dock? One then has to travel to the upper left hand corner of the screen to then either manually input and/or then move back down to the bottom of the screen to open an application from the dock. These are simply inexcusable design choices and i’m not sure how they were made.

Here is the current list of planned upgrades to start:

• Framework 16 - with Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070 GPU and AMD AI 9 HX 370 (annoyingly pre-order) i’ll be bringing my own for the rest TBD.
• Custom built keyboard with Cherry MX clears and all of the doodads i’d like in place. I’ve never built a keyboard from scratch so this should be interesting.
• Replacement of iphone 13 maybe in 2026-2027. The newest features of iphone 17 aren’t enough for me to update and I don’t need car crash detection, satellite calling or a video camera really. I’m still hesitant to leave the Apple ecosystem here, the fact is hardware wise it’s hard to beat!
• I’m using Gnome 49 via Fedora on this p52s, migration will hopefully be as simple dd cloning this HD to a new ssd in the Framework and that’s it. Fedora 43 will continue to be in use for the time being, this Omarchy distribution fad seems laughable and inspecting it a bit the install, shortcuts and setup are a security nightmare! I’m unclear on how everyone is using this “distribution” or setup-guide if that’s what you want to call it. I’ve already made some modifications to Nautilus, localsend and some other apps I need to clean up and send upstream.
• Will retain the 1U hosted with Akamai, nothing to do there.
• pepsi my main local backup mini-itx system will see a full overhaul and I will post this specification as it currently sits and version 2 of it. The short it has gone from Nexenta -> OpenIndiana -> FreeBSD -> Ubuntu and uses ZFS is the default filesystem.