It's Linux Oop North

Let's get this out of the way: yes, I know "wherefore" means "why." But people constantly misuse it to mean "where." It's my blog and I'll pun badly if I want to. In 2019, Apple moved to using the Z shell (henceforth "zsh") instead of bash as its Terminal shell on macOS. Recent versions of bash had moved to the GPL version 3, which places limits on patent licensing, and so MacOS had stuck with bash version 3.2, which by then was ancient. Most target users of Macs probably didn't notice, of course - before OS X, Mac OS didn't even *have* a shell or command line of any kind, and the first Mac keyboards didn't include cursor keys, as the Mac was intended to introduce a whole new paradigm to the general public. (The Xerox Alto and other computers from Xerox, which introduced the concept of the GUI, were far, far too expensive for general consumption. The Xerox Alto, for example, cost $100,000 *in 1971 dollars*; the Xerox Star,

 Well, I certainly didn't expect to be typing not one, but three blog entries in one week - let alone three on a theme of moving home (or not). No, there's still nothing wrong with the XPS that a binary blob (and a new battery) wouldn't fix, though after a bit of a disaster upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 21.04 to 21.10-beta, I'm currently running openSUSE Tumbleweed, which, although it has its quirks, is certainly an easier thing to get to grips with than  the new Safari . (As an inveterate distro-hopper who nevertheless has never spent much time on openSUSE, I think I'll keep it around for a good while, this time, and see how it strikes me over an extended period of use.) Yes, you can change the new Safari tab bar back so it's separate from the address bar; yes, you can move the address bar from the bottom back to the top. Unfortunately, you're stuck with the new tab bar redesign, since the option to turn them back into the old-style tab bars is gone from Safar

 (If you have not already read Part 1, you'll want to, for context. Scroll down, please.) We join our intrepid hero as he has just installed Ubuntu MATE on his brand spanking 6-year-old eBay purchase. Installation was mostly fine - one partition, normal installation, ZFS, because I can - and because I enjoy making myself regret these decisions when I later have to reinstall because I've got the urge to dual boot, since ZFS likes the whole drive to itself.  Yes, I know ZFS is incompatible with the GPL. Bite me.  Better yet, bite Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth - most likely, he can sue your ass many times over. Best of all, bite Oracle and Larry Ellison - they really should re-license ZFS under the GPL - and Solaris, since they apparently have no use for it any more. (Yes, BSD licence fans - I know I just turned your "Haha! Linux fans and their silly licence wars!" argument on its head - multiple incompatible implementations of everything, which your licence, and lic

I have used ThinkPads since getting my second laptop to run Linux on in about 2015. The first laptop was a Fujitsu, (one of the first models to come with an AMD64 processor rather than the 32-bit x86, which by then were showing their age) - which I loved, but which came to a premature end when I poured coffee on it. (By contrast, I once poured beer on a ThinkPad, and it survived.) There followed a long hiatus when I didn't have a laptop at all, although at one point I did acquire an MSI netbook running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop out of the box. Before and after that first Fujitsu laptop, I had been running Linux since about 1997 on a variety of desktops, and I'm also that rare Linux user who happens to love both Macs and MacOS (or however they're capitalising it this week), even though I wish they weren't so proprietary (and in some, though not all, cases, expensive).  Nevertheless, I recognise that, like the scores of high-end workstation and home computer manufactu