I have never bought new laptop in my life. I had P4 computer at home around 2008 - 9 After that when I dropped out of school and started working in different organisation, people helped me with their old laptops.

My first laptop was Asuse eee pc. I was using it with Ubuntu & openSUSE later on..

Asuse eee pc with makey makey circuit

I remember going to Jigish Bhai’s office and making live USB boot for openSUSE Linux distro. That was my first introduction to open source & free software world. My mama Nirmal Pathak is fedora contributor. I remember reading Kartik Bhai’s blog about debian & Wikipedia. Doing wikipedia meetup at goraj muni seva ashram.

samyak bhai introduced me to markdown, git and world of developer :)

When I went to dharampur few friends donated 2 - 3 laptops for our school.

• Toshiba - Vaibhav Pandya
• Samsung - Jubin Mehta
• Samsung (silver) - Shruti
• ASUSE - chirag patel

All the laptop were very old, their parts stopped working one by one (like screen, keyboard, battery, etc) accept Samsung (silver) one. When I went to Bhuj one visitor at our school gifted old macbook air 2013 model. It was in pretty good condition. I swapped samsung silver with that and started using it.

Since then I am using it as my primary machine. Writing, web browsing, teaching MIT Scratch to children, many other tinkering.. I changed the battery few months ago.

( Macbook Air 2013 )

In 2021 Srishti gifted her old macbook air to me. I was using it with children on and off. When Nidhi needed laptop I gave it her. But unfortunately battery of that machine got swelled like balloon. It is difficult to open the body and change it.

Now I gave my macbook air to her and decided to buy new - refurbished laptop.

After some research 2 friends suggested to check out the work of Abhas Abhinav founder of Mostly harmless computers. He is FOSS enthusiast - activist - technologist - hardware hacker - geek. He runs a libretech.shop - a ethical source for libre and liberated hardware products.

I visited his office. It was nostalgia for me to dive in to the world of FOSS again. This time Nidhi was also there. I was happy to introduce her to this philosophy..

Abhas bhai gifted me a book called ‘code swaraj’ which is in my reading list.

he also gifted mostlly harmless USB dive with around 13 type of linux distro

From his recommendation I met Ved who runs refurbished laptop shop in banaswadi. After so much of comparing and testing I finally bought refurbished Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th Gen (Intel i7 8th Gen, 16GB RAM, 512 HDD)

My criteria was

• repairablity
• possiblity to upgrade (RAM, CPU)
• portabilty (light weight)
• feature proof
• compatable with linux / free bios

Thinkpad X1C is not true for all criteria. Number 1 yes, 2 no , 3 big yes, 4 yes, 5 yes - linux can run very nicely but the bios is not free you can’t do core boot. You can’t upgrade RAM. But solution I am thinking is after 5 - 6 years of usage I can again sell it to refurbished shop and upgrade the machine.

Tjesh GN, Aditya, Kartik bhai, Nirmal bhai and Suchakra helped a lot take the disison. Thank you so much.

So welcome to family - Thinkpad X1 Carbon - 2nd March 2024

During this process I read a lot about FOSS and again visited Kartik bhai & Thejesh’s blog. I amazed with the power of community in FOSS and really wish to see that in education sector.

more about Abhas bhai / mostly harmless