2021-12-06 update:

Well, the honeymoon is over, and the crude reality has set in. The Intel NUC9 Extreme laptop, like almost all modern hardware, is a sloppily designed piece of junk. I’m updating the Design and Hardware Quality and Keyboard sections accordingly, as well as the overall final score.

I am generally averse to risks. So my buying an expensive and relatively unknown generic laptop to replace my stellar old Thinkpad T530 was decidedly out of character. But unfortunately, my requirements for a 15" primary work laptop are quite high and hard to fulfill. The aforementioned Thinkpad T530 is getting quite worn and inadequate for my computing needs. But it still leaves huge shoes to fill. After seriously considering all the laptops that ship with Linux, I determined they wouldn’t be right for me. First of all, their most promising offerings are either very expensive or out of stock or both. Additionally, it’s almost impossible to find a 15" laptop without a number pad so that the keyboard and trackpad are centered and symmetrical. Long story short, I am now the dubious owner of an Intel whitebook NUC9 Extreme laptop.

It’s been over a year since the last article about my search for a decent laptop that is highly Linux compatible. During that time, I purchased and returned not one but two defective laptops from a Linux laptop manufacturer, one of which had to be returned two times. The company is a perfectly legitimate enterprise and was very decent in its handling of all the issues that came up, so it will remain unnamed. But let’s just say that this frustrating experience only reinforced my opinion that all modern laptop hardware (and indeed most hardware in general) these days is total garbage. Enter the proponent of this article: for the next attempt at meeting my need for a secondary portable laptop I finally settled on the MSI Modern 14 (B10MW-486) unit. It is by no means a perfect laptop, but it does offer some unique benefits that make it worthy of consideration by Linux users. Read more

Since my last in-depth comparison review of search engines in 2020, there are two new and very promising options: Whoogle, designed as an anonymous proxy to Google, and Brave Search, which is a new and independent search engine that we’ll review in this article. I’m genuinely excited about Brave Search. As mentioned in previous articles on this site, I am a pragmatist, not a privacy pundit. However, I have become increasingly frustrated with Google’s search performance, and its commercial focus is increasingly imposing and overt. I can’t shake the feeling that Google is wielding its massive trove of personal information and its artificial intelligence prowess with a view to taking advantage of me instead of offering me better service. Unfortunately, the alternatives up until now have been sadly lacking, and Google continues to be the defacto search engine by a massive margin. Even a company as large as Microsoft with its deep pockets and massive human and technical resources has failed to turn its Bing product into a compelling alternative search engine. Read more

I’m a longtime Linux + Thinkpad loyalist, currently looking for a new laptop, but considering jumping ship from Thinkpad. I mainly do a lot of typing and recently lots of videoconferencing. I don’t really care about the hardware specs as long as it has 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and the hardware is completely hassle-free with Linux. Battery life should be at least average, so probably either 6 cells or a crazy-efficient CPU. And I need it to be high-quality and long-lasting with zero annoyances, as even small niggles can become unbearable after 14 hours of use, 7 days a week. This means that factors like fan noise, function keys, trackpad location, and the location of other important keys can make or break the deal for me. A bit of history: My current daily driver is a Thinkpad T530, and it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Mine has the best of the three screen options for this model, an FHD (1920x1080), and it’s still one of the best laptop screens I’ve ever seen. Read more

Since my last in-depth comparison review of alternative search engines in 2014, a lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same. Google is appearing as a loan-verb in more and more languages due to its continued dominance in the search engine market. But at the same time, Google is being increasingly demonized by privacy focused users. An even more interesting development is the trend of complaints that Google’s algorithm is producing results that are less relevant and more indicative of artificial stupidity than artificial intelligence. I belong in this latter camp, as I am more of a pragmatist than a privacy pundit. I simply want the best search results with minimal effort and no nonsense. Back in my 2014 article, I was hopeful that DuckDuckGo was quickly becoming a viable and attractive alternative to Google. While DuckDuckGo continues to be the darling of privacy conscious users and is enjoying more popularity than ever, I am concerned that its core search infrastructure and algorithms have largely stagnated. Read more

If you are reading this article, you’ve probably already heard of DuckDuckGo. Internet users that stick with the status quo usually don’t look any farther than the first search option offered by their web browser. On the other hand, inquisitive users that depend on the Internet for statistics, comparisons, and hidden pearls of useful information are probably all too familiar with the perks and pitfalls of the current Internet search engines. DuckDuckGo was nothing more than a miniscule blip on the radar of demanding Internet searchers since its inception in 2008. However, the recent scandal of NSA monitoring resulted in a massive influx of users defecting to DuckDuckGo. And a major refresh of DuckDuckGo’s interface in May, 2014 also attracted the attention of many new users, including myself. So, how does DuckDuckGo compare to the big players in the Internet search engine field? Will users who prefer DuckDuckGo for privacy related issues find what they are searching for? Read more

Arch Linux is highly respected throughout the Linux community as a cutting edge, well designed, rolling-release Linux distro with superb documentation. But at the same time, it is also discarded as a non-option by many Linux users, including experienced ones, for being time consuming to install and configure. I fall into this latter group. So, what’s a self-respecting Linux user supposed to do if (s)he wants to run Arch Linux but doesn’t want to a dedicate a whole weekend to it? Enter Manjaro, a Linux distro based on Arch. It is important to note that Manjaro is not just a re-branded Arch spin. In fact, it’s not truly an Arch system, and it does not use the Arch binary package repositories. But it’s dependent on Arch and it supposedly maintains all of the desirable features of Arch, while at the same time trying to mitigate or solve some of Arch’s less than desirable traits. Read more

I have been having no end of problems with my outbound email messages sent by my Drupal sites since I switched from shared hosting to VPS hosting. A typical shared host offers a well configured SMTP server with documentation about how to configure the MX and SPF records. On the other hand, a VPS requires the administrator to install and configure the mail transfer agent, which can be surprisingly complex. Even more difficult is the fact that the VPS provider can’t really provide a one-size-fits-all set of instructions for configuring the MX and SPF records, since there are many more variables controlled by the VPS administrator. So, suffice to say that email configuration is probably the most dreaded task of most VPS administrators. In fact, many prefer to avoid the pain and suffering altogether and use a third party email provider. However, in my case, since one of my sites sends a lot of forum activity notification emails, I prefer to save on the cost of a third party email provider and do it myself. Read more

After many years of using traditional desktop environments like Gnome 2 and KDE and XFCE, I recently spent a few months with Ubuntu 13.04. Overall, my experience with the Unity desktop was fairly positive after I tweaked and configured it to my liking. Since then, I’m using a different non-Ubuntu based distribution, so I’m currently using Mate 1.6. Probably the feature that I most miss from Unity is the launcher. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Unity launcher was so useful and intuitive for me, since I have never been particularly fond of keyboard navigation. Although I still don’t use the keyboard much for window management or within the applications, now that I’m back on Mate I find myself really missing the convenience of searching and launching both apps and files from one unified interface with just a few keywords. With the online results all disabled, Unity’s launcher learns from the user’s habits and quickly becomes uncannily accurate at suggesting relevant local files and applications based on a few letters of input. Read more

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors for Drupal are abundant. Good ones are not. Most WYSIWYG editors for Drupal produce messy markup and don’t respect the site’s CSS theme. Additionally, many of them don’t integrate well with Drupal and cause problems on certain browsers. Worse yet, almost none of them work on Apple and Android tablets and smartphones. There are a few decent WYSIWYG editors for Drupal that can produce decent markup if the writer uses the tool properly. But they are often abused by users who insist on typing up their post in Microsoft Word and then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor, resulting in awfully messy code that renders terribly. What can be done to avoid these multiple issues? The answer: Don’t use WYSWIYG editors. Now, a Drupal site without WYSIWYG editing does not mean that all users need to become HTML gurus. To the contrary, there are several options for creating content in Drupal in an easy and clean way that doesn’t use messy WYSIWYG editors. Read more