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Category: Dell

Escape from Apple: Trying a Linux Laptop

by Continuations by Albert Wenger

For quite a few years my only computer has been a 12″ Macbook. Apple, for reasons unknown, discontinued that model which had the perfect form factor in terms of weight to size tradeoff. While my  machine still works (with different keys getting stuck on occasion), I had been on the hunt for a non-Apple replacement for some time. Apple’s hypocritical stance on why they need to completely control their phones has long annoyed me and I would rather not buy their products.

I am writing this post on what will hopefully be my new machine for a few years, a DELL XPS 13 laptop running Ubuntu (I wasn’t going to leave Apple for Microsoft, even though they are at present the most benign of the big tech companies)

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Here are my first impressions of the setup. On the plus side, the hardware is excellent with a super crisp screen (that looks good in several different resolutions), an amazing keyboard (I forgot how much I actually missed that on the Macbook) and a fingerprint reader in the power button. Also all the software that I really need is “readily” available: a web browser (the machine shipped with both Chrome and Firefox pre-installed), plus Zoom and 1Password. I put “readily” in quotation marks because both Zoom and 1Password required installation.

For both Zoom and 1Password that meant downloading a .deb file and finding the right command line incantation (”sudo dpkg -i package_file.deb”). Of course in both cases there were some missing dependencies (Zoom needed (Read more...)

Equity Monday: TechCrunch goes Yahoo while welding robots raise $56M

by Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This morning was a notable one in the life of TechCrunch the publication, as our parent company’s parent company decided to sell our parent company to a different parent company. And now we’re to have to get new corporate IDs, again, as it appears that our new parent company’s parent company wants to rebrand our parent company. As Yahoo.

Cool.

Anyway, a bunch of other stuff happened as well:

  • Flywire, a Boston-based payments company filed to go public. More on the site about this shortly.
  • Earnings this week are coming from Uber and Lyft and PayPal and Square and more.
  • Dell is offloading Boomi to private equity as it wants to de-lever. Again.
  • Cloud market share numbers are out, but what matters is that the growth of the cloud market helps explain the growth that we’re seeing in the startup game. (Our own Ron Miller dug into some rival cloud metrics here.)
  • The Chinese government’s crackdown on its tech giants continues. And it’s impacting valuations.
  • And Wealthsimple raised an epic CAD$750 million round, while Ohio-based Path (Read more...)