Oh gosh what happened to my configs…

I swear they’re around here somewhere.

It’s only been a month. I’m already tired of Gnome Shell.

Man, I wish I had Unity back.

But for now, I guess that’s not gonna happen. (I prefer support and available resources to continuing to use a deprecated piece of software, so let’s pretend Unity was already sliced and diced for this article.)

Gnome Shell has had a number of issues in 17.10, hopefully getting fixed in 18.04. But for now, while I’m on 17.10 and fighting with a number of non-gui related issues, I just want a good desktop experience that I can get work done with.

Note! Outdated content ahead! Skip to the update!

Just browsing reddit one day, when this comes along.

This looks interesting, so I said I would test it out, let’s get started.

As my daily driver for a year now, the Oryx Pro (orxp1) laptop from System76 has been an extremely enjoyable experience.

If you didn’t already know, System76 sells Linux / Ubuntu laptops. The hardware supports Linux out of the box, and System76 provides support and drivers to the customers for additional features.

I bought the Oryx Pro in June of 2016 while working at ORNL, and since then I have not regretted my decision.

This post has been updated and some of the information in the original article is no longer applicable. Please read towards the end for the update.

As some may know, I’m now attending the University of Tennessee, where they have a decent set of computing resources available for students opportunistic use.

Their computing clusters are collectively known as “Newton”, which is actually a collection of multiple clusters.

As a freshman, even though I’ve been working at ORNL with the supercomputing group, I still haven’t had much experience with larger-scale applications, so this is my first dive into supercomputing-scale programming.

Since I didn’t have any ideas for potential applications to run on these systems, I reached out to my successor for the L&N STEMpunks programming lead, Cade Brown, who is much better at theoretical mathematics and optimization than I am.

Cade has written many programs which require high-intensity computing resources, so I thought he would be an excellent candidate to offer computing resources to.