Good news — the new company also provides laptops, and I got a Lenovo Xiaoxin 14 Pro with 32GB of RAM, the best-spec work computer I’ve had in 8 years.
The bad news is it has a glossy screen, and the office lights are so bright that the glare hurts my eyes. Luckily I also got a monitor, so I just use the external display (too bad the OLED has better colors…).
Last time I set up Windows was two years ago at my previous company. Back then I hadn’t used Windows for nearly 10 years, so it took me a while. This time it was much faster, mainly because WSL has become much more convenient — the system has a built-in wsl command. As long as the network works, wsl install -d Debian is all you need to get started.
For me, this is the only improvement worth appreciating in Windows today, as it gets worse and worse.
On the software side, having been a ChromeOS user for 3–4 years, most of my daily tools are web apps and VSCode-based extensions. So this time I only needed to install Chrome and VSCode. Annoyed by Microsoft’s silent updates and forced Copilot, I switched to the open-source VSCodium. In practice there’s no real difference — SSH and container plugins all work fine. For my use, it’s no different from the official VSCode.
Wish me luck in my new job!
