It gets easier and easier to set up a new computer. I took advantage of the Cyber Monday deals to get myself a ThinkPad that I immediately proceeded to switch over to Ubuntu. Before the cloud getting a new computer introduced a whole world of pain since you had to worry about migrating important files. These days it’s incredibly simple: most of our digital lives are replicated somewhere online and local files can be kept in Dropbox while code is kept on GitHub. I migrated from OS X to Ubuntu and the vast majority of the issues I’m running into are keyboard shortcut and workflow related and nothing to do with the software itself.

The only difficult parts of the migration were moving secrets and application configurations. I wrote about the secret migration but that only adds some usability friction. Similar with application configurations - I can always recreate my options but it’s much easier to just export the configuration from the old computer and load it into the new one. I’m approaching this on an on-demand basis as I use an application and so far have done my shell config files (with updated paths), Visual Studio Code, DataGrip, and IntelliJ. There are quite a few left but once I get used to the keyboard layout and the new shortcuts I’ll be as productive as ever.