Dusting off the Fedora box

I've got a System76 tower that I put away for a while to do some work on the house. It had sat unused for a while.  Tonight I got the proverbial wild hair and decided to cable it back up in my office. It's in the middle of getting through 2387+ package updates, and I eagerly await whatever hell will break loose after that.  (Update: Actually, none. It just took forever to reboot and then it was fine.)

I've got a Dell monitor with built-in kvm and enough ports that the Mac Studio can connect via USB-C, the tower can connect via HDMI and another USB-C, and the two can share the wireless keyboard and mouse dongles I've got plugged into a few USB-A ports. So it's easy to share peripherals via the remaining ports, and I've even got a YubiKey both machines can use sitting in one of the bottom front USB ports. It takes all of three seconds to switch between the two machines.  As with last time, I've got Syncthing running to keep things like ~/bin and my Doom Emacs config in sync across my machines, and the NAS to serve up common files.

Why I bothered is sort of another story. I'm choosing to take it as a sign that a lot of work I've done to unplug from time-wasters and unhealthy distractions is paying off in the form of having a certain kind of mental energy to fiddle around with stuff again.

Now that it's up and running, it's easy to remember what I liked about it: GNOME is clean and simple, or at least I made sure it stayed that way. It's reminding me of when I went on a "make my Macs more minimal" kick in reaction to liking GNOME so much. It'll be nice having it hanging off the kvm during the day, when I want to take a break from work and do some writing or whatever: There's just not much going on there, so it'll be simple to mute the Mac, set an egg timer, and goof off without a bunch of stuff jumping around from work.

I guess getting this thing up and running again occurred to me at all because someone mentioned that Framework is about to start taking preorders on a sweet little 12" laptop I have no need for, but it made me feel a little restless.