New Laptup Update, or my Hate for Amazon Sellers/Delivery Services
Published: 11 October 2024
Ahh, last week. The week when I was super enthusiastic about receiving the new laptop that I ordered. So excited, in fact, that I even posted a gemlog entry with my musings about which Linux distro I was going to put on in and how I might potentially customise it:
New Laptop and Linux Distro and Desktop Environment Musings - Tiff the Valkyrie's Gemlog
I happily thought I'd be deep down the bunny hole of exploring those customisation options at this point, probably entrenched into the man pages of Sway's configuration to learn how to tweak it just to my liking. Ahh, last week's me was so cute and naïve!
Lost in the Sauce: Amazon/DPD Woes
My laptop was due to be delivered early this week. It's now Friday and, sadly, it isn't here. Even more unfortunately, one of the reasons I ordered it was to have it for when I'm travelling for a bit from Sunday. I'm definitely not going to have it for that trip now, and that sucks.
I don't even know fully who to be annoyed at! The laptop I was suppose to be receiving is being sold by a seller on Amazon, one that specialises in distributing older, recycled/refurbished hardware. I received a tracking number from parcel delivery company DPD just prior to when it was suppose to be sent, but any attempt to track it yielded an error saying they hadn't received the package yet. Yesterday, it finally updated with a message stating that the package was likely "lost."
I contacted the seller a couple of days ago and they were very nice and apologetic. They even offered me a small discount on a product they were already selling for cheap and promised to "send another one" ASAP. I assume this means they already tried to send the first and it was either lost in transit to DPD, or DPD somehow lost it themselves. I'm leaning towards the latter as I assume if a tracking number was generated it must have been in their possession at some point. Not a great look for a company that proclaims themselves to be "your delivery experts."
The Saga Continues
So now I wait for another tracking number for the new package that allegedly was sent out of the seller's store yesterday. I try to remain optimistic that there hopefully won't be a sequel to the initial experience.
New Laptop's Linux Distro/Environment
On the plus side, I've had plenty of time to think after making my initial post. I think I'm settled on the following for my new laptop when it eventually does show up:
- OS: Fedora Linux 41 (Atomic Sway Spin)
- Environment: Swap Wayland Compositor
I've been playing around more and more in VMs with immutable distributions and I like how they're managed. I've also been familiarising myself with the distrobox tool[2], which is a wrapper around Docker/Podman/OCI containers[3]. This can be used to install software in a container which also has access to your real machine's /home folder on an underlying distro of your choice. I intend layer this to replace the default Toolbx[4] utility as it's a little more flexible. Installing software on atomic distributions using this method can be handy for things that may not have a flatpak or may not work great in that format. I'm thinking I'll probably use it to install Visual Studio Code as the flatpak isn't the smoothest experience and I'd rather not layer too much software via rpm-ostree.
Sway
I was learning towards using the Sway WM originally, but browsing the rather unfortunately named /r/unixporn subreddit[5] to look at peoples' customisations confirmed that's what I wanted to go with. In particular I noticed a few other Sway setups that caught my eye:
thealik's Nordish, minimal Sway theme
Each of those themes has elements that caught my attention, and my own theme is probably going to attempt to capture the best (in my eyes) of those three. I'll see what I come up with. The "Ubuntu-style" positioning of the bar in the third is particularly interesting, as many seem to go with it either at the top or bottom. I wonder how usable/intuitive I'd find a bar in that position myself in practice? I like the menu for application launching of the second link, but the rounded, "floating" top bar of MuskyMarks' theme with space between the rounded workspace icons also looks nice. I think the Catppuccin theme project[5] is neat and something I'm probably learning towards using as well.
Either way, I'm grateful there's a lot of other, much-more-creative-than-me, customisers out there who are enthusiastic to share their creations as well as links to their git repositories containing the configuration files so folks can easily copy or borrow from their work!
Patience
Anyway, I find myself getting hyped again about customisation when I really must temper that enthusiasm. Realistically I won't be getting the laptop before Sunday when I'm heading away from home for a week. That means I shan't have my hands on my new device until 21st October at a minimum now.
The best laid plans of mice and men...
References
[1] New Laptop and Linux Distro and Desktop Environment Musings - Tiff the Valkyrie's Gemlog
[3] Open Container Initiative - Open Container Initiative
[5] r/unixporn - the home for *NIX customization!
[6] catppuccin/catppuccin: 😸 Soothing pastel theme for the high-spirited!
Mailbag
Comments and replies to this post are welcome. Feel free to send a cosmic raven to:
Misfin: tiff@valkyrieshowl.com
Email: surges.colts_0s@icloud.com
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