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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 25th, 2023

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  • they make bad products that are media darlings because it’s fashion more than anything. they’re treated like consumer advocates but they are one of the absolute worst companies for vendor lock-in, and are absolutely anti-consumer, but will have innumerable articles written about how they’re “the best” for any given measure. it drives me nuts how the public perception of them is the complete opposite of what they actually are, and i don’t get it.

    also their software is bad. all due credit their hardware impressed but it doesn’t matter if the software is crap.

    and they aren’t private: they’ve got all your data but have somehow convinced everyone that it’s fine that they have it because they’re somehow better than every other large tech company.





  • The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.

    I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.

    On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.

    I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.






  • patchexempt@lemmy.ziptoLinux@lemmy.mlNew laptop
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    6 months ago

    it’s easy to recommend a ThinkPad for Linux, and something in the T or P series laptops might suit you. video editing is a potential difficulty though, as that feels a little more workstation-grade than the rest, and you’ll probably want to go big on RAM (32GB would be best) and be sure to get at least an intel i7. I’ve not had great luck with battery life on AMD (shame because everything else is great) but perhaps others have tips for doing better.

    you could also go for the ThinkPad yoga models (make sure they’re still ThinkPad though! they also sell a different model line just called “yoga”) if you wanted a tablet/convertible for graphics work.

    anyway look at the T14, P14s, or P16 if you want something bigger. whatever the latest generation of those models is.





  • this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren’t in control of system software. there’s like a gradient of possibility here:

    • Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it. those things are too heavily scrutinized, someone would’ve found it, and the companies that make them don’t have the impetus.
    • official “smart” voice devices from Amazon, Google, et al: doubt it, same reasoning as above
    • Android phones from small players, heavily subsidized models, etc.: sure, could be
    • smart TVs from major manufacturers: probably not? medium “maybe”? I bought one of these with a hardware mic switch so I guess that shows my paranoia
    • other smart TVs: I dunno, feels highly likely

    so: I’m careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would’ve discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don’t remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.


  • I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.



  • these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they’ve been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:

    • ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I’m worried about long-term availability of replacements
    • can’t do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don’t want Bluetooth latency
    • they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you’re on a Skype call from 2003

    so they are good but don’t solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I’m just doing meetings and listening to music.