The laptop I have been using has been working rather well for a while now. With one exception: the last few weeks it’s been shutting itself down rather suddenly, and then refusing to boot back up until I have powered it on with the battery disconnected. Maybe I can fix it by replacing the battery. Maybe something about the power circuit stuff is toast.

Either way, my brilliant fiancée suggested that I set up the desktop computer I haven’t used in a couple of years, and start working on that. Just so I’m not entirely stranded when or if the laptop draws its last breath.

This has led to a few discoveries, some of which are worth sharing:

1. I decided to run CentOS this time. Not a huge change, but still some new things to get used to. There’s a surprising amount of stuff you have to compile manually!
2. In a last-minute snap decision, I did not install XMonad. I decided, on highly rational grounds, to try StumpWM. Not because I think StumpWM has better code – XMonad is hard to beat in that area – but because it is designed with the more hacker-friendly architecture¹¹ How many window managers let you open up a command-line interface into the running session, modifying it as you go?. This is something I really, really need to write about now.
3. In order to work on stuff with my laptop as well as desktop computer, I took a closer look at SyncThing²² Distributed, torrent-like file sharing solution. again. It was easier to set up than I remembered it to be.