I had been meaning to upgrade my early-2015 MBP for quite some time.

Then I got one from office, so did not need to upgrade.

then something or the other kept coming up.

Few months ago, I visited a shop to get battery replaced for my MBP

The service was good.

The shopkeeper also told me that he has some used MBP for sale.

Usually these come from corporate customers (I think) and are in good condition.

As I wrote earlier I’m doing Flutter Development on a Windows 10 machine.

The configuration of this machine is as follows :

• Intel i7-6600U @ 2.60GHz
• 16GB RAM
• 224 GB SSD
• AMD Radeon R7 M360 (2GB)

So on paper this looks impressive.

But it feels so sluggish.

But “feels” is very subjective. (My other machine is 10-year-old-MBP) So I decided to gather actual timing.

• Starting Visual Studio Code took > 1 minutes 51 seconds (After which I gave up) Gemini Assist was still not done loading. ¹ But even without it, it took > 1 minute
• Starting Android Emulator took : 1 minute 40 seconds
  • UI showed up after 7 seconds
  • Pixel is starting message after 1 minute 14 seconds
  • and Then I see System UI is not responding (I choose Wait ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )
• Starting Android Emulator (cold boot) took : 3 minutes 28 seconds
  • UI showed up after 43 seconds
  • Pixel is starting message after 1 minute 59 seconds
  • and Then I see System UI is not responding (I choose Wait ¯_(ツ)_/¯ )

In the mean time, VS Code reports

Recently, I started working on a flutter project. I started on my own 10-year old MBP. (running Linux mint 22.1 BTW) It has “just” 8GB RAM. Flutter development is (near) impossible on this machine.

As per the documentation Android Studio requires 8GB and with Emulator 16GB, while 32GB is the “recommended” configuration.

But it is not just the documentation. I tried to push through. Decided to use Physical device rather than Emulator. But even then, it was just too slow.

I have been almost exclusively using Ubuntu and its derivatives as long as I remember ¹

Benefit of using such mainstream distro was that for the most part, all the software was available in deb format.

But recently things are changing.

More and more software is being made available via snaps, flatpak or appimages

Much can be said about pros and cons of each of these. But that is not the point of this post. 😄

During Ganeshotsav, Jnana Prabodhini Prashala organizes a variety of workshops for students. For these 10 days, there are no regular classes — instead, students immerse themselves in learning new skills.

This year, I had the privilege of conducting a Mass Media workshop for 20 boys from 5th to 7th standard (a mixed group).

I don’t need to emphasize how bright these children are — after all, they are among the 80 selected out of 1200+ who appear for the entrance exam. Still, knowing this in theory is very different from experiencing it firsthand.

Yesterday, before I installed Hyprland on Mint I was researching Hyprland, and someone/somewhere mentioned pikaOS

PikaOS is a gaming/optimization-focused Linux distribution that emphasizes ease of use and high compatibility. Built on a Debian base but with cherry picked and custom compiled packages ensures that Pika is stable whilst being bang up to date!

I had mentioned in my post about Omarchy that I would have liked if it had Live ISO

I like to “try before buy install”.

Ever since I read (and watched videos) about Omarchy I so wanted to try it. As I mentioned, the ISO directly wants to install it on the machine. There is no live - try before you install - option. So I didn’t.

I wanted the next best thing.

Try Hyprland with disturbing the cart too much.

Why not try setting it with Linux Mint that I’m already using ?

Reddit forums were discouraging.

I had tried Omakub a while ago. While it is nice, it is Ubuntu under the hood, and Gnome and I did not like the aesthetics of it.

I then used KDE for long time via Tuxedo OS, and then settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon flavour.

Recently I came across Omarchy via the Reowrk podcast

It is next incarnation of DHH’s (dare I say infactuation?) move to linux.

As is the natural progression, one enters Linux world via safe Ubuntu (or derivatives) before venturing into distros like Arch Linux, Gentoo (or NixOS)

I was told by AnduinOS by one of my friend. I was told that it looks like Windows 11

I was intrigued.

Spoiler Alert : It does not 😄

Let me explain the usecase

I’m working on a flutter app that talks to REST API. During the development, the server wil lbe on localhost but in production it would be real server.

Solution ? Use --dart-define

Way to do this is pass the value during the build time like flutter build apk --dart-define=BASE_URL=http://10.0.2.2:8000

10.0.2.2 is a special alias to your host machine from within the Android emulator. ¹ When running the app on an Android emulator, it allows access to your local development server.