halfbyte

For a couple of weeks now I started to use Windows more (mostly for one specific project) as I need two very specific things:

1. A windows test setup. Theoretically I could migrate my old VMs to Linux and run them from there, but the tests I do are very hardware specific and usually running Windows in a VM gives, unfortunately different results.
2. A VPN connection. This frustrates me the most as I simply can't make that connection work under Linux which feels wrong.

The way I work is that for the most part I run a VM with a small Linux setup that has my project installed and I also use that VM to run my editor. I know this is probably not the best setup, but I did, by now run into so many weird issues with developing directly on Windows that I don't even trust solutions like Vagrant. And while this project would allow me to work on windows, everything is actually faster within the VM than on native windows (or WSL for that matter). This also feels wrong, but my time is too precious to do a deep dive in investigating the matter.

During my Depfu development time, I'm almost exclusively on Linux, where I have now settled on a stock Ubuntu with very little extras.

My plan is now to maybe during the next few months to set up an actual desktop workstation (and hopefully get a better monitor) – I'm currently pondering a Silentmaxx machine, as they manage to get their beefy machines to be absolutely silent. My Razer is, especially when running Windows with VMs, mostly not very quiet (It's also not as loud as my old PC, but after spending years on an iMac, my standards are now somewhat different.

The reason I want a real desktop machine is to have a little extra headroom both CPU and memory wise and also have something that can be a bit more future proof and upgradeable. The prospect of getting a box that fulfills that and manages to do so entirely while beeing passively cooled is very appealing.

But what about the phone.

Now that I have abandoned Apple on the general purpose computing side of things, I also started to wonder about my phone. My current phone is an iPhone 6s and I'm still quite happy with it. My original plan was to replace it with one of the new phones, but looking at the lineup, price wise, the Xr is the only option for me (only barely, too) and I think it's actually a bit too big for me. Now, I am a bit reluctant to change over to the Android side of things for various reasons and so, after much thinking, I have decided to not decide things yet.