My personal laptop died. I acquired a secondhand Dell Latitude 5285. The specs (i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) aren’t as fancy as they could be, but the price was right.

I initially tried to install Windows 11 to determine if the device was entirely functional, as one does with a used device. It seems the i5 isn’t a supported generation, though. So back to good ol’ Windows 10. Which worked great during testing! As I’m a self-described Linux fan, I then proceeded to install and setup Linux Mint Debian Edition like I run on my old laptop and my current desktop.

Sadly, I didn’t like it. There was nothing concretely wrong, but it didn’t feel as fluid as it was supposed to, maybe I’m growing out of Linux on my personal workstations. But it didn’t feel right. Cinnamon has a primary focus on being used on a desktop. Gnome Shell felt better, but the onscreen keyboard wasn’t reliable at detecting when to pop up. Moving from tablet to laptop mode was a hassle as there wasn’t a software tablet mode to enable or something.

Well, back to Windows. It works fine, but I’ll need to rethink a couple different workflows.