Intro

This laptop was a refurbished laptop that i got back in somewhere around 2016-18 ish.

Linux

I started my linux journey with this laptop, these are the flavours that i tried in chronological order.

Kali Linux

If you are on Indian youtube and especially a teenager, the algorithm will feed you to become a hacker and so on. Lucky for me, I got fascinated by Kali for ethical purposes. I live boot my laptop and learnt the overall desktop as in my teenage i barely have to do anything productive.

Debian

Then i installed my first operating system on my system drive, when i wasn't able to tolerate windows slow speed on my ancient hardware. I never regret coming to free (as in freedom) and open-source operating system.

Arch-Linux

This is when i really step up myself to learn all the directory, partitions etc. of the linux system. I remember when i started arch i failed almost 10 times and restarted. Funny thing is i didn't fail but i was not known that i have to install a bootloader in order to boot my system up. Yeah! i installed arch the correct way the first time but thought that i messed up that's why it didn't boot.

When i first installed arch, then i started my toxic journey to minimal system. I got into suckless softwares and started building my system from ground up. Definitely not productive but it was fun and learned a lot.

Proxmox

I first installed proxmox on Harshdeep's Computer and then i just loved the possibilities that i can do with it. So i installed it on my laptop. Yes I know you might be laughing right now by just reading that i am running a type-1 hypervisor on a portable machine. But here's what i did different.

I installed a secondary wifi card on my laptop, and then installed pfsense on it. In that way i installed my router on portable machine, so all my internal infrastructure was wired up virtually. Everything was fine until my single dual core processor along with mechanical hard drive started giving I/O latency of almost 100 percent. So i had fun here as well but it wasn't reliable to run pihole + lxc containers on such a tini tiny laptop.

You can find the scripts here.

Arch-Linux + Manjaro

This was my production setup. As i wanted to stick to minimal system for my learning and understanding and honestly speaking to play with linux. But i ultimately have to have convinience of kde connect etc. So I did what any other person would do, I dual booted linux with linux.

You can find the scripts to install arch with manjaro here.

Farewell

In the summer 2023, i bid farewell to my long standed partner in fun, we had so much fun time together.

Windows Incident

At the time when i tried dual booting windows with linux in UEFI mode, Every goddamn time i boot in uefi something has to go wrong. I fried my motherboard (not sure). But i could say that because dell latitude is an enterprise grade laptop when it first launched and it has debugging for almost everything. I first received error code for led strip, then for hard drive unplugged and at last for ram. I switched ram in their slots and then tried all possible combination but ended up not booting. So this could happen only in case of motherboard got fried. So yeah with very great confidence i would say installing windows fried my laptop because this had happened twice.