"[Growing up] is hard and nobody understands." // https://www.homestuck.com/story/2391

July 15 2024. Turkey lettuce cream cheese sandwich for breakfast. Spent most of the day today setting up my laptop and figuring out performance. CPU wise it's for sure more powerful than my M1, and it has the cooling system to match. Windows 11 itself though still has a little bit of jankiness to some animations, especially the older ones. Both Windows and macOS have a hodgepodge of dated UI elements, especially when using older applications, but Windows has gone through so many shifts that their seamlines stick out more. Display scaling on 1080p is also meh. I downscaled to 125% from 150%, but I think I do best at a hypothetical 130%. Lower pixels per inch also means a few fonts look a little fuzzy, but that's to be expected. And, going from 23.5 inches of screen estate to 14 inches naturally puts a dent in visual multitasking. The main visibility issue is that the screen is closer to my eyes than my iMac, which really trips up the astigmatism in my right eye. Inputs are excellent but I do forget ThinkPads have stiffer keystrokes, which will take some adjusting to. The Mylar plastic trackpad is kind of polar. It tracks smoother than a glass trackpad if your hands are bone dry, but tracks worse than glass (and maybe plastic) with just a little moisture. Updates suck, but the NVMe(?) SSD and AMD chip chow down on them. The main time sink is application installation, going at it one by one and trying to remember if you got all the information you needed on the external SSD. And I'll tell you it was a real headache for a couple programs, like Dendron, mentally converting between the macOS and Windows file systems and watching out for .yml(?!) config files. Perks of getting settled into a desktop operating system for the last 3 years I suppose. Still, this ThinkPad feels broadly more convenient than my iMac. I do miss the screen estate, but the fingerprint reader, matte screen, and mobile build make for a pretty cozy ⁠— and familiar ⁠— computing experience. Going from 8GB RAM to 32GB also feels very liberating. I can actually open Chrome and Darktable at the same time!

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