Gear (in progress)

All my computers, starting from my very first home computer in the 80s, have always had their own name. Sometimes inherited from a previous machine, more often a very specific denomination. Today, I try not to have many machines because I simply do not have enough time to play with them. But I still think you should have three or four PCs, new and old ones, for job-related stuff and for tinkering. So, this is my roster at the moment.

Leningrad (Lenny)

Leningrad, or Lenny, is my 'toy machine', born from a desire to play with ricing and Arch. First of all Arch, also to prove that no, it's not that difficult to install and configure as many fear - and as many seasoned Arch users seem to want us to believe. For me, 'I use Arch btw' has lost its original elitist meaning (and this is very ok).

Like Leningrad-the-city, Lenny is quite old. A ThinkPad X390 with an 8th-gen i5 processor, no GPU and simply 8 GB of RAM. Linux makes it zippy enough for most ordinary tasks, and the X390 is slim, light and durable enough to act as a road warrior. After all these years, its battery has a good amount of juice.

Lenny is like a petri dish: what works on it, will probably work on any other of my more powerful computers. Also because Arch is a collection of moving parts that's easy to break, so if a piece of software is stable in Leningrad, it's ok anywhere. Bonus point: I bought Lenny used, paying cash, so there is no official digital record linking me to it. This doesn't make it 'safe', but it's better than nothing.