I recently purchased a new laptop after spending a few months without one. This purchase has been a long time coming as I was waiting for Black Friday deals to start in the US to save some money.
I received many recommendations about the XPS 15 9500 series, thanks all. I set my sights on the XPS 15 9520 that seemed to have specs that will last the full 8 years I'm hoping to get out of this purchase. These were the specs I chose:
- 12th Gen i9-12900HK (14 cores, 5.0GHz Turbo)
- GeForce RTX 3050Ti
- 2x16GB DDR5 RAM
- 2TB SSD, OLED screen
After a few days of use I absolutely love the machine and am so happy to get back into open source after an extended break. I recorded my "speed run" to setup my machine to be ready for open source contributions below so others can recreate it:
Install all the packages
sudo apt-get install build-essential git openssh-client gnome-tweaks \
libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev \
llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libffi-dev \
liblzma-dev gedit
Fix right clicks on a trackpad
Right clicks didn't work out of the box which can be a frustrating experience. I've been
through this before though, the gnome-tweaks package has a setting to fix this.
- Open the "Tweaks" program through activities
- Select "Keyboard & Mouse"
- Under "Mouse Click Emulation" select "Area"
Get access to password manager, SSH and GPG keys
I previously saved my SSH public and private key and GPG key into my password manager under secure notes. Time to retrieve those values and get access to my passwords so I can login to my accounts.
- Open Firefox
- Install the BitWarden extension
- Login to BitWarden
- Download the
id_rsa,id_rsa.pub, andgpg.keyfiles from secure notes
# Put your keys here:
gedit ~/.ssh/id_rsa
gedit ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
# Apply the proper permissions (u+rw)
chmod -R 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa*
# Import my GPG key after exporting from other machine:
# gpg --export-secret-key ${id} > gpg.key
gpg --import gpg.key
Configure git
git config --global user.name "Seth Michael Larson"
git config --global user.email "sethmichaellarson@gmail.com"
# Telling git about my GPG key
gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long
# /home/sethmlarson/.gnupg/pubring.kbx
# ------------------------------------
# sec rsa4096/022EB89790807303 ...
# id is '022EB89790807303' from above output
git config --global user.signingkey 022EB89790807303
# Telling git to always sign commits
git config --global commit.gpgsign true
Install Python
git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
cd ~/.pyenv && src/configure && make -C src
echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
At this point I closed and restarted a terminal instance to get pyenv on the path.
pyenv install 3.11.0
pyenv global 3.11.0
Install PyCharm community edition
sudo snap install pycharm-community --classic
From here I'm ready to work on open source projects, happy hacking!
Thanks for reading! ♡ Did you find this article helpful and want more content like it?
Get notified of new posts by subscribing to the RSS feed or the email newsletter.
This work is licensed under 
