Might I ask which:

1. Which Thinkpad? (CPU model and graphics would be helpful)
2. What resolution and refresh rate of monitor?
3. What does the trackpoint do during this? I know you said it’s not the mouse, but I’m just curious.

If it’s a modern-ish Thinkpad (like ~2018 or newer), these problems are weird and I have no advice to offer, but if you’re one of those guys who daily-drives a Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, I’m curious how they do when hooked to a 4K monitor.

1. Alpine is still a Linux distro, just a lighter one. Also, busybox is a set of standard utilities as an alternative to coreutils; I have no idea how it’s particularly relevant here.
2. The thing is, I’m not using only Docker. I also use native nginx as a reverse proxy, for which I like Debian’s defaults, as well as SyncThing, which are both well-maintained packages in Debian. Also I kind of prefer glibc distros. While glibc kind of sucks, so much stuff I like using prefers or requires it; for instance, last I saw, mDNS/Avahi resolution on BusyBox was kind of a pain in the rear.
3. Most of what I use Flatpak for isn’t network-facing or opening unverified files anyway; the most important applications I do run the native Debian version. Honestly, truth be told, you are correct that I do often prefer native versions and will run the native Debian package if possible (and considering the current age of stable, a lot of them really aren’t that old; Inkscape is basically still the latest version, for instance, while Firefox is always kept to the latest ESR); at some point, though, I do find a Debian package that is too behind to do what I do (though rare, TBH), and despite some issues with Flatpak, at the end of the day, I need to just get a piece of software installed and get on with my day. In that case, I just do a Benjamin Sisko:

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and containerization (as well as Debian often being well-supported by upstream projects for script or package-based install), I feel like the age of Debian packages isn’t that annoying anymore; anything important gets security patches, and it’s easier than ever to use 3rd party software without breaking your system. I will add that Debian seems to be much better these days at making sure either a reasonably up-to-date version ships with a release (and can be kept secure during a stable cycle) or not shipping it at all as to allow the user to install it themselves.

I remember back in just 2021 when it took months after Firefox ESR 78 went EOL for them to update Bullseye to 91; recently, it only took them a few days after 140’s EOL to switch to 153 (and 91-115 and 115-140 happened without much note either), which isn’t perfect, but much better than it was.

If you need to install it on a new laptop, backports often has you covered. I ran a backports kernel for about a year on Debian Bookworm to get my laptop’s Wi-Fi modem working; I was able to quit using the backports kernel once Trixie came out.

No, not until 2027. I don’t really know why this meme was posted at this exact moment.

Eh. They’re actually pretty on top of security patches for pretty much any internet-exposed server software.

The OpenSSL incident was a long time ago at this point.

Uploading a gz source archive to a Git repository is absolutely cursed. Still, looks like a cool project.

I’ll also add that if you do enable SSH and are stupid enough to expose port 22, then at least make sure you have key-based authentication instead of password authentication and keep your keys safe.

I could never get Gnome Network Displays to work, but it’s worth a shot.

I personally never want to touch anything Adobe ever again, but for my father’s and grandfather’s use cases, they still need it, so if it ends up working well, maybe it’ll finally allow them to use Linux.

xkcd 1085:

Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it’s all being sent over RDP.

I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.

When it freeze, after you’ve rebooted it, try running sudo journalctl -p 5 -b -1; you might see something in those logs.

Maybe also open a task manager before you do anything graphics intensive, just to see if there’s a process that rapidly increases its memory usage; while it might not be the cause, I’ve experienced similar freezes when I use all my memory (on a machine with 32GB of RAM).

FYI Don’t use this command. I think it was intended as a joke, but I just want to clarify.

Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.

That is kind of awesome.

I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.

May I ask what your config was, such as distro, packaging format, and extensions were used? Also, what hardware?

Additionally, what issues specifically were you experiencing specifically? Were sites just loading slowly?

I ask because I’ve used recent versions Firefox on decently old hardware with 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores and had almost no problems. Everything rendered correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. I’d be curious to know why that isn’t happening for you.

May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).

Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.

• Blink is resource intensive and has so many non-standard APIs for the sake of Google’s version of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
• WebKit takes 50 years to support the newest standards.
• Gecko (Firefox) is non-modular and is limited to being used in Firefox, Thunderbird, and forks and Firefox as a result. Its performance is also somewhat worse than Chrome’s, but not noticeable for daily use.

Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.

Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.

Assuming she hasn’t bought it yet, please research that Yoga first. It might work fine, but it could also end up being a miserable experience.

You can check https://linux-hardware.org/ for the model or a similar one.

No, I mean TinyCore literally would run out of RAM during boot.