Zelaf

And Linux Mint DE instead of NixOS and Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora 😊

Almost sounds like it, these were all recent experiences. I’ve been looking at Lenovo previously as a potential “look-at-first” brand, can’t really say goto since if there was something more fitting I’d drop them in a heart beat back when looking for laptops but their offerings were cheaper and on paper didn’t seem to lack much.

I had my internship there this year. The issues with my lenovo laptop started in 2021 after I bought it, managed to get my money back after 2 years late last year and decided to go full time on the Steam Deck as my personal computer alongside a portable monitor.

The HP laptops all felt pretty solid when I set them up, the company gave me a spare Lenovo laptop that was just laying around that worked okay, forgot which model but I think it was probably around their 1200 euro range probably. But the HPs didn’t have much in terms of keyboard flex and the trackpad felt really nice, however I was only having it for a couple of hours before they were being repackaged to get to the customer so no real time to judge anything.

I ralso recognised having brand loyalty towards prefab computers were pointless pretty early on. Everything from the lack of upgraidability to the lack of easy access to repairs and sending enormous parts for minor things just wasn’t cutting it for me. I’m glad with my Steam Deck now actually, with my monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse I can manage my own IT stuff at home from anywhere and do my dev stuff pretty comfortably. Knowing I can also go to ifixit to buy spare parts whenever I want is a nice bonus!

As for HP being shit in every other area, yea, I’m always gonna keep in mind to not buy their printers and stay away from them as much as possible.

What did add up on Lenovo’s side was their customer support in my country. They were very kind and helpful regarding my issue but I couldn’t sit around and wait for it to be fixed and them trying 100 different things.

But thank you for telling me your experience, I’ll make sure to keep it in mind when getting my job and hopefully have the opportunity to be able to give someone something that won’t break!

Would love to hear your thoughts on HP. I had an internship at a IT company doing general setup and maintenance for businesses IT and since each consultant managed their own customer they often stuck with their own brands.

Having setup some of these I often felt like Lenovo was hot garbage, I’ve had a lenovo laptop with terrible manufacturing issues and the company I was at too and some of my friends. I would feel lucky if I get a Lenovo laptop without errors. Dell I haven’t heard anything bad of in general, one employee usually preferred buying them and then one other preffered HP. There was one or two people there who ordered Lenovo simply because they were so much cheaper for the specs but build quality and other components are just so garbage.

Of course, I’m not speaking about their budget 300 euro to 700 euro laptops now. The ones I was able to handle and setup were all 1300 to 3500 euros.

This is true.

Sweden’s on their way to doing that. They’re looking into making encrypted chats illegal…

While I love Bazzite and have been using it as my primary OS on my only computer which is a Steam Deck, I’m not sure I can agree that a non-tinkerer should go with it. I’d probably follow along the Linux Mint train honestly. It’s an honest project with their heart in the right place and makes usability a breeze and with a wider community than rpm-ostree based Fedora it’s probably gonna be more minor issues and annoyances in the long run.

I find your point interesting and I agree to some extent.

When I have people around me that express some type of radical view I usually casually mention a slight disagreement or let it slide because I know going into a debate with me won’t really change much.

However expressing opinions and feelings that are inherently based on hatred or lack of understanding, at least from what history has told, will lead to them being acted upon. Having resenting opinions about LGBT, for example, and grouping up with people with that mindset will probably spiral it into more lack of understanding and stronger opinions against it. Eventually leading to a growing and potentially spreading resentment against it. This extends to religion, skin colour, countries, mental diagnoses or anything else really.

What the “core” is so to speak is about things that people can’t inherently control, being born differently, being born in a certain place, etc.

I wish I could upvote twice, you’re gonna save me so much time.

I’m there too right now. Got a DS720+ but it’s struggling a little since I’m also self hosting mail through it. I’ve been eyeing to use NC as a replacement for everything but do get mixed feelings from threads like these lol

I hope to in the future get a proper little mini PC with a disk enclosure in the future to have as a replacement for that however!

Out of curiosity, what do you use instead?

That’s so weird, I decided to completely drop Google as my primary a while back because by the end, the only search results I got was literally only spam and SEO spam/adware links on anything I ever searched. DDG didn’t have any of this. Could search how to do something on a Foss project running on my server and 80% of the results were spam links and the other weren’t even relevant to the search. For me Google took a shit, Bing was slow and DDG was just a good in-between.

I grew up with the cheapest and most worn down vacuum cleaners. It was awful, everything from having to pull it out of a cabinet to finding an outlet and, having bad suction, awful cleaning heads and annoying hoses.

So when I got my own apartment and worked for a bit I decided to go all in on a Dyson Absolute V12 Detect. It’s actually very painless and super quick to vacuum now. Also a bit fun.

With a rechargeable battery it’s wireless and the battery lasts me about 4 vacuuming sessions in my apartment, no keeping track of vacuum bags and filters. All in all it takes me from touching my vacuum to being done cleaning my, albeit 1 room apartment, about 10 minutes. It’s great!

Pop is growing in popularity for all the right reasons! I hope it works out great for you! A few tips I would give is to make sure to do backups and look into things like Timeshift to make unexplainable errors and potentially wonky package installs easier to undo!

I’ve been in your shoes many many times. My needs and expectations change every few years. I recently bought a Steam Deck and have been using an OCI image called Bazzite based on Fedora Silverblue the past few weeks and it’s been great exploring Linux and feeling the real ownership of the things I run and host.

I’m a tinkerer at heart, have two Raspberry Pis, one running as a router and the other running as a general server paired with my Synology DS720+ as a self hosted everything else, email, online docs, cloud server, Jellyfin, etc.

If you want it to be easy look at some distros like Bazzite which has a good gaming focus. Or Linux mint which is great as well.

Look at alternative software for what you’re using, music software has Ardour for a DAW or Audacity/Tenacity for general audio editing. Kdenlive works great too or davinci resolve if you really need more oomph.

AMD hardware always works better with Linux so if you have or can upgrade to AMD stuff make that a bigger priority especially since they focus more on FOSS software and release a lot of things as such.

You don’t have to feel guilty about not cutting off some programs and web apps. As a photographer I’ll probably never be able to leave Adobe sadly but I’ll just accept that.

Don’t be afraid to try things and experiment, it’s the fun of it. Looking and trying new things. It’ll be a great way to get back into it!

That’s not misleading, that sites subtitle is just blatantly lying.

Man that truly has been my experience as well with getting to know Linux from my late childhood/early teens to now. Free was fun, tinkering became more fun and then Microsoft doing the worst company decisions for what I need made me feel disgust about it.

It feels more like you’re working with the community instead of working against Microsoft.

Getting my education in Microsoft IT Environments and this is spot on. I’ve been using Linux on and off for about 10 or so years and now and getting around to learn Microsoft Server, Azure, Powershell and other Microsoft products.

It all feels like a constant pain of trying to read jumpy and unclear documentation, getting through obscure hoops, not finding anything when searching for errors. It’s like I have to either be hand-held by Microsoft against my will or contacting a senior sysadmin who’ve stumbled across it from his senior or messed about for long enough to get a solution going.

There’s always speedbumps no matter how easy you’re trying to make it. Instead of universal solutions it’s so targeted you have to save your own. In the end you have a cluttered library of obscure powershell scripts that configures the most weird things that are either very poorly documented or only referenced once somewhere else or not at all. In the end, it never feels like you have control of the system. The only thing that makes things secure are hopes and prayers and that one setting doesn’t affect the other because you’ll never know.

For me, like you said in your post, I’m a tinkerer, I love configuring, making things do things the way I want it and generally trying out new things.

But most of your points I feel stand true, for the absolute average user not giving a care, having the warranty and more technical support available from their laptop/computer manufacturer is probably the way to go. Unless they want to try something different for the hell of it. I find installing and using Linux in its most basic form today is nothing hard with the right distro, and finding a distro to get started with that is stable and easy isn’t a difficult task either. Freezes, strange hiccups and weird hardware errors is what made me switch recently, I’ve been using Linux on and off for years depending on what my use-case is around the time. Getting a free speed boost, having a faster computer, getting loaded in quicker and just in general getting a different feel for how you use your computer could be a nice plus for some. Like people liking OSX because it feels different or vice versa. It’s an available alternative.

My arguments could still be considered edge-cases, I don’t really disagree with that but it’s still something. Like Valve choosing Linux and pushing Proton development because it works for them and they can make it work for their end-users rather than having to jump hoops with Microsoft, forcing Microsoft accounts and a heavier OS. Their reasoning can be put into the average end users as well I would feel like.

But in the end, the average user browses the web, watch online content, stares at Facebook and maybe plays The Sims 4 on low settings or something. They have no real reason to switch because what they use works for them so why would they bother? If they like things the same, they’ll stick to the same. If they want to try something different, at least there’s alternatives.

I tried Solus OS when it first arrived and it was in its first releases and I absolutely loved it. It felt very stable and well made. How do you feel it handles Qt and GTK apps?