I decided to pull what I call The Laptop out of its bag and update the Debian Squeeze installation that has been running on this 233 MHz Pentium II machine since soon after the most recent Debian release went Stable in February 2011.

Prior to that, the now-12-year-old laptop -- which is as solid as a tank except for the weak joints where the screen pivots -- ran Debian Lenny for a long while.

I've written many dozen blog entries about Linux and BSD systems running on this machine, which I bought for (I probably overpaid) back in 2007 (or was it '08?) when I wanted a laptop but couldn't find anything I could afford.

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As much as I dislike his Gwibber social-networking application, I'm that much more of an unabashed fan of Ryan Paul's tech journalism for ArsTechnica, itself a bastion of high-quality reporting and writing.

While I think Paul's a little too close to Ubuntu to write about it objectively, he's just too good not to read.

A recent article, Two decades of productivity: Vim's 20th anniversary, shows Paul at his best:

Vim has been my editor of choice since 1998, about a year after I started using Linux as my main desktop operating system. I’ve used it to write several thousand articles and many, many lines of code. Although I’ve experimented with a lot of conventional modern text editors, I haven’t found any that match Vim’s efficiency. After using Vim nearly every day for so many years, I’m still discovering new features, capabilities, and useful behaviors that further improve my productivity.

Vim has aged well over the past 20 years. It’s not just a greybeard relic—the editor is still as compelling as ever and continues to attract new users. The learning curve is steep, but the productivity gains are well worth the effort.

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