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Computing transitions
After facing various unexpected thorny issues, some of which I mentioned here, I have been making better progress with my personal computing, both at home and on remote servers. I even have the wireless access point working in client bridge mode, something that should have taken but a few minutes, not a few days.
On the remote server side, switching MTA to Exim for the meantime looks optimal. It appears to be decently packaged in pkgsrc and, albeit after some non-trivial reading, appears to do everything I need. I have high regard for Exim and for Philip Hazel who developed it; I relied on it during my stint running a mail system professionally, my first exposure to the ongoing horrors of Exchange. Mail seems to be flowing well and I am near decommissioning the fallback OpenSMTPD-based servers. Though mail was a stumbling block, other services have been migrated far more easily.
Someday I would like to move back to running OpenSMTPD. Exim is configured by means of a veritable panoply of configuration settings. Before making non-trivial changes, one must understand that Exim is most capable but thinks in a very particular way, one must get one's head around routers, transports, how to write access control rules, etc.: its power is not to be tapped lightly. In contrast, OpenSMTPD takes a pf-like approach to configuration, one writes in terms of a mini-language rather than via configuration settings, which I find to be more succinct and readable.
On the home side, I am retiring my ASUS ZenBook in favor of an E-series Lenovo ThinkPad which turns out to have the most dreadful built-in camera that I have ever witnessed. Running Linux on a new laptop computer is always a challenge: it is not much exaggeration to say that, by the time a model is known to work well with Linux, it is no longer sold, and, even if it does work, probably that is only with the latest device drivers rather than an older, stable release. For this reason, my ZenBook runs Void, a rolling distribution that I have come to regard highly. However, now Devuan's more mature, I am giving beowulf a try on the ThinkPad and it is working out well, though I did have to install a very recent kernel to get the wifi working.
I am used to changes in keyboard mapping. In Boston, I used Programmer Dvorak on a split keyboard at work, then a regular Qwerty keyboard at home. Now, at home, I have a UK keyboard on my ZenBook and externally on my work HP, but a US keyboard internally in that HP and on my ThinkPad. A new mismatch for me is that, in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard, my ZenBook has Ctrl and Fn the opposite way around from my ThinkPad. As with everything else, I will get used to it.
On the remote server side, switching MTA to Exim for the meantime looks optimal. It appears to be decently packaged in pkgsrc and, albeit after some non-trivial reading, appears to do everything I need. I have high regard for Exim and for Philip Hazel who developed it; I relied on it during my stint running a mail system professionally, my first exposure to the ongoing horrors of Exchange. Mail seems to be flowing well and I am near decommissioning the fallback OpenSMTPD-based servers. Though mail was a stumbling block, other services have been migrated far more easily.
Someday I would like to move back to running OpenSMTPD. Exim is configured by means of a veritable panoply of configuration settings. Before making non-trivial changes, one must understand that Exim is most capable but thinks in a very particular way, one must get one's head around routers, transports, how to write access control rules, etc.: its power is not to be tapped lightly. In contrast, OpenSMTPD takes a pf-like approach to configuration, one writes in terms of a mini-language rather than via configuration settings, which I find to be more succinct and readable.
On the home side, I am retiring my ASUS ZenBook in favor of an E-series Lenovo ThinkPad which turns out to have the most dreadful built-in camera that I have ever witnessed. Running Linux on a new laptop computer is always a challenge: it is not much exaggeration to say that, by the time a model is known to work well with Linux, it is no longer sold, and, even if it does work, probably that is only with the latest device drivers rather than an older, stable release. For this reason, my ZenBook runs Void, a rolling distribution that I have come to regard highly. However, now Devuan's more mature, I am giving beowulf a try on the ThinkPad and it is working out well, though I did have to install a very recent kernel to get the wifi working.
I am used to changes in keyboard mapping. In Boston, I used Programmer Dvorak on a split keyboard at work, then a regular Qwerty keyboard at home. Now, at home, I have a UK keyboard on my ZenBook and externally on my work HP, but a US keyboard internally in that HP and on my ThinkPad. A new mismatch for me is that, in the bottom-left corner of the keyboard, my ZenBook has Ctrl and Fn the opposite way around from my ThinkPad. As with everything else, I will get used to it.
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I do not have the skills to make a laptop functional without Microsoft, which totally annoys me. And I'm incredibly icon impaired and have never been able to use a Mac. Plus everything I have stored in terms of MY work is all PC.
Computers are wonderful things that are designed to eventually give everyone with no IT skills a complete mental breakdown.
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The state of software engineering seems such that it's gone downhill since, judging by the confusing, buggy rubbish we accept as normal these days. How this stuff gets past QA, I don't want to know. Needlessly it's far more work than it should be to coax most things into decent behavior. Having IT skills makes it very annoying because you so clearly see what they should have done instead. I guess, a bit like my handyman seeing various stuff in the house that wasn't done cheaply, simply incompetently. Though, it helps to be able to guess enough about what's really going on so as to be able to devise a workaround.
I'd also say that Macs are nowhere near as intuitively usable as the market image suggests. I had naively gone in with high expectations and was shocked when I first got much exposure to them and found basic UI principles repeatedly violated.
You're right to be annoyed. As a Chartered IT Professional, there sure are times I wish that IT weren't my career, so I could reduce my involvement accordingly.
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