I was recently reading about Apple’s new MacBook Neo. If you somehow haven’t encountered it yet, it’s a very cheap, but pretty competent MacBook. It made me realise that I owe a lot, to a really terrible PC I used to have.
It was about 5/6 years ago, I’d recently finished my masters degree and (probably related) had zero money. I needed a laptop, but couldn’t really afford anything with power.
Chromebooks are a great fit for this market, but I (for some reason) decided not to follow that great fit, and instead chose, the (drumroll). . . . HP stream!
I can only assume its named after the stream that you’ll inevitably throw it into after being insanely frustrated with how bad it is. It’s a very low powered laptop, made out of cheap plastic (although it cost me less than £200 so this shouldn’t really be a surprise).
It’s specs include:
- 4GB RAM
- 32GB storage
- VIBRANT COLOURS! (I mention because it seems to be mentioned on all the descriptions of this laptop, although mine was, sadly grey - maybe it was “vibrant grey”)
4GB RAM probably sounds bad (and it is) - chrome and teams will happily eat all of that up in a single sitting. But what really got me was the 32GB storage, and specifically 32GB storage in conjunction with Windows.
For the first 3/4 months, the laptop served me really well, until Windows, being Windows, released an update (yay!).
In itself, that might sound fine, but Windows, being Windows actually required something like 20GB free space in order to apply this apparantly security critical update. If you’re astute, you’ll realise that 20GB is fortunately less than 32GB, but sadly, Windows also required around 10-12GB for itself.
I took the plunge, deleted all my files and software (not much, I only had 32GB storage), and hit update. Only to find, that I still didn’t have enough space.
I could have left the laptop running an older version of Windows and probably been fine, but Windows being Windows made this option reaally unpleasant, I had “SECURITY CRITICAL UPDATE REQUIRED” pop-ups happening left right and centre, with Windows nagging me to carry out the impossible update every minute.
Eventually, I gave up and installed Linux. Initially Elementary OS, and then later, when I got really into finding out how small a space the OS could take up, Arch with I3 as a desktop manager.
The best thing is, everything just worked. The laptop was from then on, actually pretty snappy, I used it for a whole bunch of things. Getting more into Linux (I had used it before this point) was a really fun experience, and I was learning to code at the same time, so it was the perfect combo.
I have a much less terrible laptop now (a System76 Lemur Pro, still running ElementaryOS) and I’m able to do things like Rust compilation that’d probably be horrible on the HP stream, but I don’t think I’d have shelled out for a purpose built Linux laptop if it hadn’t been so good to me for all those years.
So I guess, thank you HP stream and Windows, for getting me into Linux and computing! (not that I’ll be using the HP stream or Windows again voluntarily any time soon).