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.

xxyz

xxyz (strictly lowercase) is my job machine. It's a M1 MacBook Air: the cheapest Apple notebook model on sale when I bought it at MediaMarkt, because it had just been replaced by a newer version. Good for me. In these four years, xxyz followed me everywhere in the world, doing everything from writing text to video and audio editing, from graphic stuff to software development (I earn my money doing many different things).

I used to like Apple a lot and I owned something like 20 Macs, having bought my first one circa 1990. Things have changed, greatly, and Apple now is a nasty corporation like any other. Also, Cupertino doesn't care that much about Macs anymore, and it shows. But Macs' software-hardware stack is still reliable and I (reasonably) can trust a Mac notebook to work whenever I need, with anything I throw at it.

Sakura

Sakura has a strange story. Years ago, I had the chance to spend a few weeks in a small relaxing town far away from my home. While I was there, some personal drama unexpectedly took off and I decided to stay where I was, for a couple of months more. I had with me all I needed (not much) but not my PC, so I decided to buy a cheap new one, to do some basic work while my new temporary life unfolded.

I had few choices, where I happened to live, so I ended buying a silver-ish plasticky notebook by a chinese brand that, since then, has disappeared from any digital or physical store. However, this notebook surpassed my - quite low, I must say - expectations: with Linux on it, and ditching the preconfigured Windows 11 S, it supported basic workloads. With it, I enriched my surprise months away from home writing code for 6502 emulators and playing with Gemini protocol.

Sakura - this has always been its name - is still with me. It's really low-spec (a Pentium Silver notebook with 4 GB of RAM and Intel integrated graphics), with a BIOS so basic that it's perfect for distro-hopping: it takes everything without a fuss, from Linux distros to BSDs, to Haiku. It spent most of its life with Manjaro, it's now on pure Arch.