I now have a laptop dedicated to writing, both private stuff and posts for this site. I’m writing this on it, it’s a Thinkpad T520 which I’ve had for a few years and which has had various OSes installed but I’ve settled (for now) on Endeavour OS with the i3 window manager. I’ve had ‘writing laptops’ before - they generally have arcane setups to persuade myself to focus but I spend more time setting them up than doing any actual writing. Hopefully this time it’ll be different! I’ve used Linux pretty much exclusively for a while, it started quite gradually installing it on spare machines, running into problems then going back to Windows at first, then took over to the point where the only Windows machine in the house is my work laptop and the only other iteration is a spare SSD that slots in to this very machine if required (although it never is). I’ve distro hopped, generally using the Debian/Ubuntu strain, with Mint being a particular favourite for some time, now I have this machine with Endeavour, which is developed from Arch, my ‘main’ laptop runs Fedora (XFCE desktop environment) and the server and backup server (which deserve their own post at some point) run FreeBSD. I’ve toyed with i3 here and there, thought it might be useful for a no-frills, no distraction machine so here it is. There’s quite a learning curve, I’m subconsciously reaching for the touchpad to open up a menu that doesn’t exist but my thought process is that the more I use it the more I’ll get used to it. The personal writing saves to a Proton drive connected via rclone and the website updates via github. It’s been quite an experience getting everything working; now all I need to do is start using the thing for its intended purpose…