for want of a nail, the kingdom was...delayed

[cellio]

I have an open-source project I am very enthusiastic about (Codidact). Mostly my role does not involve the code directly: I'm the community lead (i.e. primary talker-with-people-who-use-it and triager of feature requests), and I do some design of features, workflows, wireframes, internal documentation, and stuff like that. And I beat up on the test server a lot when there's work in progress to poke at. We have infrastructure to support all that.

But sometimes I'd like to get a little closer to the code, mostly for my own education and partly so I can maybe help do smaller things because our team is pretty small still. And there was that one time that I really wanted to fix a front-end bug that I admitted was limited in scope; it was bothering me, but not something to drag a developer off of something else for. And it was in the Javascript code, which I can bumble my way through, so ok, I figured, I can do this. (And there was that weird thing about dates in Javascript, but I digress.) But I didn't have a dev environment to test it with, and ended up putting it in a userscript to test and then asking somebody else to plug it in for real, which meant I needed help from one of the developers after all, and I shouldn't be that lame.

My Mac with its older operating system is not compatible with some library or other that we use (details forgotten; I just remember the long setup sequence that ultimately failed). And people said "why not update your OS?" and I said "ha ha no" -- not going to break what's working on a machine I depend on. Clearly, what I need is an inexpensive dev environment somewhere, maybe something I could connect to remotely or maybe outdated-but-more-current-than-mine hardware that would be good enough for this purpose.

I went to the elves for counsel, and one suggestion was a cheap AWS instance (considered it), and then our team lead said "a Raspberry Pi would be fine". And lo, Raspberry Pis are cheap, but they're also aimed at the do-it-yourselfers, and to say that I am not a hardware tinkerer would be an understatement. I am not at al enamored of the "ooh, let's take a bunch of parts and build a fabulous machine!" project; I just want a working machine. I will spend money to keep more of my hair attached to my head. I said this to our lead, who said "here's a place that'll sell you all the stuff including a pre-loaded operating system, but you have to put it into the case yourself", and I said "deal".

My box of Pi stuff came, but did not include any assembly documentation and there were a few things I was mystified about. (I had a package of heat sinks but no clue what to do with them, for instance. They were three different sizes, so I thought it was a general package from which I was supposed to choose one. Got that sorted.) With some further help from the elves I was able to sort out what goes where, and this afternoon I assembled it all, pulled out a spare monitor that I knew spoke HDMI because it still had an HDMI cable dangling from it... and found that the other end of that cable was not HDMI but some older fatter connector type with pins (yeah I've lost track of video-connector history), and I do not in fact have a spare monitor with an HDMI port.

But wait, I said. Surely in the vast world of gadgets and connectors and adapters, there is a thingie that lets you plug in two HDMI cables, maybe because you need a longer cable (extension-cord style). And lo, this is a thing, and when my $5 part arrives I will be able to set all this up and see if it works.

It's always something, isn't it?

(I believe that, longer-term, I will be able to set this up so that I can connect to it remotely, from a few feet away, and it won't need its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least most of the time. But for now, it can have a corner of the desk to get up and running until I learn how to do that.)

I see one more benefit to doing all this, one that's not about Codidact. Someday I will need to replace my primary machine, as all hardware goes the way of dinosaurs eventually, and I'm not sure I want to keep buying into the Mac ecosystem. I moved from Windows to Mac some time back (the Windows option at the time was Vista), and maybe I will move from Mac to Linux next time. I'm comfortable on the Linux command line, but am unfamiliar with the Linux GUI setup. This seems a way for me to explore that world some.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I updated my circa-2014 Mac Mini to Catalina. It was a terrible decision. The machine is less stable than before, and it's horribly slow. Right now I do most things on a Linux Mint laptop, except for the things which are hard to move from the Mac.

[goljerp]

Yeah. I feel a bit like an old man shaking a cane, but I've been underwhelmed by the changes to the Mac OS (and the hardware which the OS changes are pushing us to).

I love the magsafe connectors (The real ones, not what they're calling magsafe now). They are perfect for how I use my laptops. I don't want to go back to hard connectors which will drag my laptops to the floor (I lost one that way pre-mag safe), and I don't really care if it's thinner, if it doesn't have the ports I need. Light is nice, but functional is nicer. Also I resent having to spend money on a hacky substitute for what just worked right in the first place. And I don't really need more emojis and "dark mode" or whatever the latest "features" are.

And why won't those darn kids get off my lawn? (Grumble grumble grumble)

[cellio]

Apple's one-true-way-ism in software design¹ has always annoyed me, but they made things pretty easy, from setup to maintenance. I can't put my finger on exactly why, but some of their more recent software changes (by which I mean their applications bundle too, not just the OS) seem to be going in the wrong direction for me -- more annoying, less useful, harder to work around. And sometimes stuff just doesn't work right; I actually tried to take the Pages update they've been nagging me about for the last year, and it wouldn't update and didn't give meaningful error messages. Eh, ok, fine, the one I've got is fine because I don't use it much, but what if it were something I cared about? Lately the vibe just feels off to me in ways I can't articulate.

¹ And hardware design for that matter. I don't use my iPod much any more, but when I did I had about a 50-50 chance of turning it off on the first try. That damn menu-wheel thingie never worked right for me.

[cellio]

I remember you writing about that. Dani had some problems with Catalina too -- not as bad as yours because his hardware was newer, but as another person with a vintage Mac Mini, I'm still on Sierra and that's just fine for me. Catalina broke stuff for him and whatever mountain was next broke some more and I don't know if he's moved past that.

I considered moving to newer hardware when they finally started paying attention to the Mini again after years of neglect, but it's moved out of its original price point and I'm not sure I want to invest to the level now required. If the Mini were still a $400-500 machine I'd consider it, but it's not. Apple is clearly way more interested in laptops and tablets and cloud-based stuff, and paying a premium price to try to do something that doesn't seem to be in alignment with their goals doesn't seem wise. So maybe my next desktop machine will run some sort of Linux; don't know.

I haven't considered Linux before now because it seems to be aimed at people who groove on being their own sys admins and poking at things and stuff. I want something that just works out of the box. I'll customize some things from there (I'll immediately look for vision-accessibility aids), but I don't want to start with "go find some device drivers" and stuff. Life is too short. Some people are really into that; I'm not. It sounds like the Linux world might have some distros for people like me, maybe -- need to do more research. Someday. Before this machine dies, which probably isn't imminent but will happen at some point.