The New PC Arrived a Day Early ...

... and the changeover to my brand new CyberGeek Nano J1 Linux Mini PC is complete enough for me to be posting from it.

Step one was wiping the ATOPNUC Mini PC completely, putting a clean install of Ubuntu on it, unplugging all the cables (two HDMI outputs, USB keyboard, USB dongle for wireless mouse, and Ethernet), and putting it away (in the box the new PC came in, since the beautiful box the ATOPNUC came in seems to have gone missing).

Step two was plugging all of those cables into the new PC, booting it up, letting it get far enough into Ubuntu configuration that I knew things were working OK, rebooting it to a live/install Lubuntu USB, installing Ubuntu, configuring Ubuntu (including all my preferences for taskbars, quick launch icons, etc.), then working my way through a cheat sheet I'd pre-written of various Firefox tweaks and necessary installs (e.g. Dropbox).

All of that went reasonably well (for some reason, Dropbox wanted to install/configure VERY slowly, and I still don't have a system tray icon for it ... but I'm definitely connected/syncing, so not too worried about it).

I installed the System Profiler and Benchmark app to verify that it has the processor and RAM advertised, and it does.

It's noticeably faster than the ATOPNUC (which will sit in its box as an emergency "oh shit, another machine went down" option until someone, fairly soon, wants or needs it for something). I'm already liking it a lot, and am getting used to Firefox quickly enough that I have no intention of installing Chrome.

What I am doing is a better and more thorough (and probably multi-day) job than previously of uninstalling a bunch of crap that I never wanted but that comes standard. For example, while LibreOffice is nice, I've not had occasion to use it in years ... but uninstalling its various elements using Lubuntu's "Discover" package manager leaves an overall item on the menu that can't be deleted. So I did a little looking around and found out that yeah, the whole suite has to be purged from the command line to be really gone. No need to have a bunch of stuff I don't want taking up disk space and remaining in my application menus.

In a few days, I may get ambitious and start figuring out how to use Wine or some virtual machine app to emulate Windows 98, and install Starcraft. Been a few years since I've played that.