Today I had a near-disaster. I was at a coffee shop doing a little work. The software updater came up showing there some updates available, including a kernel update. I said OK, let it do its thing, and dismissed a message telling me to restart because I had some work open. An hour or two later, I shut the laptop lid, stashed it in my laptop sleeve, and went home.
Unfortunately for me, I forgot that I had to do a restart. I have my laptop set to hibernate when the lid is shut. But apparently, when a restart is required in Ubuntu, your system will restart come hell or high water–and that’s just what it did instead of hibernating, zipped up nice and snug in my neoprene laptop sleeve.
In case you haven’t heard of neoprene, it’s the material that wetsuits are made of: water resistant and able to keep a body warm while surrounded in freezing waters. They’re made to retain heat. Needless to say, they retain heat pretty damn well when there’s a running laptop zipped inside. A few hours later, I went to get my laptop out of the bag. My bag was pretty warm, and I instantly realized what had happened. I scrambled to pull the laptop out of the neoprene oven—my bag stank of burning plastic and the laptop was so hot I couldn’t hold it. Sure that it been damaged, I turned it off and put it under a floor fan to cool down.
Not only did it cool down in a few minutes, but it emerged unscathed from the neoprene oven. Everything is working perfectly. I’ve carried this laptop around the world in all sorts of environments, and it’s still alive.
There’s no stupid media keys, there’s 2 USB ports on either side for easy accessibility, there’s a Home button that I map to my home folder, the keyboard is responsive and the touchpad buttons are satisfyingly clicky. The screen is matte so I can use it in the sun. In short, I love this laptop.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, can go fuck itself for restarting when I told it to hibernate. At the very least it could have just shut down completely.
