About the funny laptop
The "funny laptop" is the nickname I have given to one Packard Bell EasyNote TE69BM laptop. It had Windows 8.1 preinstalled, with all of that sweet, sweet Packard Bell bloatware to boot. Said bloatware, of course, included the legendary WildTangent Games App as a Win32 program as well as a Metro-style app, alongside a handful of free trials that happened to include Peggle Nights - probably the single best thing to come from the factory experience!
About a month into having this laptop, however, I replaced the mechanical hard disk with a solid state drive and then proceeded to install Fedora Linux with KDE Plasma, which is where it's at now. This is especially nice as there is no way the funny laptop is going to run Windows 11, and it's otherwise actually decent enough to become secondary to my main laptop, despite being unable to play many big video games.
The day of the funny laptop
In late March 2024, I set aside one day to find out just how good this laptop would be as a secondary, by literally forcing myself to use it instead of the main laptop, not touching the main laptop even once during the day. I documented the highlights of the day over on wetdry.world. In short, I learned that it is indeed usable, though somewhat held back by the processor.
Two more small issues!
There are, however, a couple more problems. First of all, it appears that the laptop has lost the ability to recharge.
I had previously bought a new battery, and then a new charger, assuming that those were the problem, both of which turned out false.
Additionally, the DVD drive tray will not eject itself. I have no experience with either kind of hardware fault so
unfortunately I may not be able to fix these problems on my own.
Using Arch btw
In late September 2024, I decided to redo everything and install Arch Linux, foregoing archinstall,
out of curiousity about the traditional setup. I had been at it for about an hour and a half by the time I started
installing Plasma, and even afterwards I still kept forgetting to install the most basic desktop components,
such as Spectacle.
In the Spectacle thread, I further posted a screenshot of a mouse pointer that looked out of place due to a
misconfiguration of Flatpak. While I hadn't thought to mention it in the moment, that experience led me to realise
that a pair of portals were missing.
Overall, the Arch experience so far has been interesting and it gave me a slightly different perspective on Linux.
(please do not take this as a recommendation for beginners to try Arch!)
There may be more to come
The funny laptop journey is not quite over yet. Although this is all I can cover here for now, I will make sure to update this page as the circumstances of this laptop change, likely in tandem with a fedi post or two.