When I did the short-term contract last year I had to bring my own PC for the first 3 weeks of it. Unwilling to bring in my Dell, which is a heavy, chunky gamer PC (I’m not a gamer; I just wanted something decent for a change), I got a cheap Acer that had the advantage of being light. Afterwards, I mostly used it to watch youtube, or to play Songstarr in the back room to noodle along with the bass to various songs.
When I switched into ‘learning dev’ Dave suggested I switch it over from windows to linux and use that instead, so that I could directly use Ruby. I had Ruby available on the dell but via a virtual environment, and it is clunky. The operating system is now Ubunto Mint. I use Atom as my editor.
I have used Linux in the past at various jobs, to do various tasks. But it’s been years. And the laptop is super slow-mo. Chugga chugga chug.
One thing I really didn’t expect was how competent I’d have to become in constantly fixing and upgrading just the framework stuff that comes with this sort of work. eg – I have recently done some workshops and I needed Pycharm installed. Ok, that’s a python thing, and I did have python/pip for some reason on there…but there has been an upgrade to Ubunto, pip, and python. So things were not uploading or completing and I had to work out why. I had to do a thing with mirrors (! a new concept for me!) – sorting out how to make everything work in order to START to try to get the new version of pip was a long tedious painful mess.
It also turned out the only solution to have Pycharm look at the most recent python version too was to create a virtual Python environment and use that. That wasn’t my solution, Dave figured out that – and my friend Jay (a more often python user) said ‘yep, that’s what you have to do!’. I did have to figure out how to configure everything though and again, took forever. People seem to assume a Ubuntu user knows their shit.
I spent a full day learning the joys of wrestling with a machine that also crashed in the middle of it, and how do you get out of a crashed Linux machine? I had to use Dell to troubleshoot. Ok, fixed, next bit.
I also needed other automation tools (like chrome driver, postman, and eclipse) on my machine and have discovered the joy that is getting them installed and run on Ubuntu. IT IS NOT LIKE WINDOWS. And I am not a mac user. Dad has a mac and sometimes asks me for tech support and I hate it, I don’t know the system and have to work everything out from first principles.
Thankfully there is lots of help if you do a web search, but also you have to find the most compatible answer for your problem – or the answer that you can understand. I like ‘run this’. There is little you can’t undo!I totally have had to learn how to figure out where the download goes, how to unzip it, install it and even launch it to use it – eg, in the case of Postman, Ubuntu deceptively installs a shortcut but click all you like, nothing happens. Actually have to run it from the command line. That was SO HELPFUL in the workshop on Thursday. So. Helpful.
The other thing I really didn’t understand till recently: permissions (sudo!), and where things are. I’m chipping away at filling my gaps in knowledge but it’s slow. I don’t know what I don’t know. I guess I know a lot more than I used to. I guess the title of this is a slight misnomer : it didn’t win. It was a draw. I got what I needed done and then it decided to crash again on me and not run things I knew I’d installed….but. I am not defeated. I WILL SUBDUE YOU TO MY WILL, CRAPPY ACER LAPTOP!
