My Laptop

Posted on Jan 22, 2026
tl;dr: it is far more fun to keep something in-repair than constantly buying something new and being disappointed

If the server is the loud, power-hungry goblin under my desk, then my laptop is the polite little gremlin that follows me around and pretends it isn’t constantly on the brink of running out of battery (it isn’t although it would be if it were running Windows).

It’s an ASUS Vivobook Intel Core i3, running Kubuntu. Not exactly a Framework (that is my work laptop) but not exactly a dumpster fire either. It lives squarely in that budget realm where expectations must be set correctly, like you’re negotiating with a cat.

The hardware

The X1500E is not here to impress anyone. It’s here to open terminals, browse docs, and survive being shoved into a bag with a charger.

The Core i3 is… fine. It won’t transcode a film in real-time while compiling a kernel and hosting a Minecraft server, but it will happily:

  • run a browser with a reasonable number of tabs (reasonable meaning “less than a small novel”), I regularly have at least 30 tabs open.
  • handle SSH sessions into the homelab without crapping out.
  • do actual work like writing, scripting, and general tinkering.

If you treat it like a daily driver and not a portable datacenter, it behaves.

Why Kubuntu?

I like KDE. It’s comfy. It’s familiar. It lets me make my desktop look the way I want without having to write a manifesto about “workflow minimalism”.

Kubuntu on this laptop is the sweet spot between:

  • usable out of the box
  • not fighting me
  • still being Linux

Everything important works, and that’s the real luxury.

Wi-Fi? Works.
Audio? Works.
Suspend? Usually works (which in laptop terms is basically a standing ovation). If I am honest I will probably disable and have Sleep as the closed-lid option. Battery life? Acceptable, if I don’t start pretending I’m on mains power. It is actually quite bad, I can’t get more than 90 minutes out of it on most days.

The real use case

This laptop is mostly a control panel for everything else. It’s where I do all of the things that don’t need dedicated hardware, including some light gaming.

It’s also the machine I reach for when I want to do something rather than maintain something, which is a subtle but important distinction when you’ve got a homelab constantly whispering “update me” from the shadows.

The verdict

The ASUS Vivobook X1500E is not glamorous. But with Kubuntu on it, it becomes something I genuinely enjoy using, which is a rare outcome for budget laptops. It’s responsive, calm, and gets out of my way.

And honestly, that’s all I want from a laptop.

Now if it could also stop me from opening yet another browser tab, we’d have true innovation.