I am perfectly comfortable saying that I’m not that bright, or that I tend to be oblivious or dense. Every accomplishment that I had in my life came from the hard work I put in and not exactly from my own intellect. I don’t believe that I’m completely hopeless, but sometimes it does take me a while longer to “get things” compared to others around me, and that’s perfectly fine as long as I get things done by the end of the day and I keep trying things even if I’m not the best at them. However, occasionally I do have experiences that truly test if I am just that dumb, or if the subject manner is somehow presented dumber than I am, and trying to get Linux working on my laptop is one of them.

Most of my experience with Linux was from using WSL 2 with Ubuntu. I felt more comfortable with using command lines from school and work, and I had a great experience developing with the MacBook Pro that my work gave to me. I had my own irritation with using Windows, and I wanted something new and fresh, so I splurged over $1000 on a 12th gen intel laptop from Framework. Framework is a company that sells repairable and upgradable laptops, and I was happy to buy a laptop from them to support a company that tried to make their hardware last as long as possible and reduce e-waste. They had an option to build the laptop yourself with no OS included so that you can bring your own, which I decided to use a desktop Linux distro.

After all of the parts came in, I assembled the laptop and used an old USB drive to install a Linux distro after I flashed one onto it. I have flashed, installed, and reinstalled Fedora, Mint, Manjaro, and now Ubuntu onto the drive, and every time I do there is a new error that pops up that makes the device unusable. After one or two, I can admit that I might have messed up somewhere in the process, but four is a pattern. It might just be me being paranoid about my own shortcomings, but I get suspicious when something goes wrong this many times.

I’m planning on talking to Framework customer support about it, and I’ve heard pretty good things about it, so I’m not too worried about that. I’m sure that as long as I keep trying and ask for help from the right people, I’ll be able to get it fixed up. I think it’s good to have a humble attitude and that it’s easy to be wrong about a certain topic, especially with a field advancing as fast as the tech sector. Hopefully, by the next time I’m writing a new blog post, I can be writing on my Framework Laptop running something Debian or Arch based.