@stuckgum I bought a PC there ~six years ago and a Laptop ~3 years ago. Both are still runnig quite good, no hardware or linux based problems. Only with windows in dualboot... šļø
I had once contact to the service (windows dualboot...) and they could help me quick.
So the only thing I could complain about would be the price.
I bought a tuxedo laptop about 2 years ago. Iāve only had one issue with it, where it would go to 100% fan speed for about 2 seconds after turning it on. Other than that Iām really happy with it āŗļø
i bought the tuxedo nano (a mini pc but decently powerful), and its not 100% linux compatible. i imagine its better if you install their own distro (maybe) but running arch linux with the standard kernel on it, iāve had issues with HPET/TSC (some cpu timekeeping stuff, ruined performance when it happened), the wifi card it came with is known to have issues and iāve had plenty (usable, but super slow bandwidth depending on what AP i connect to, and no its not the AP all other devices work fine on it), and some lockups when my usb microphone is connected (sometimes it only crashed the usb hub which i could reset).
NONE of these issues are present running arch linux on my old desktop and 2 work laptops. Support wasnt helpful either.
However, its still my main device, i just had to work around these issues.
edit oh, and the fan is not controllable from linux at all, iāve spent hours trying to find a way. i do not know if itās controllable from windows either, maybe itās just the mainboard that doesnāt allow fan control at all outside of the UEFI settings.
I did have a couple of issues with a model with an nvidia video card, but the tuxedo tech I got in contact with took great care to troubleshoot the issue with me and report the issue up to the Dev team that works with nvidia. So compatibility may not be 100% but the service is great. Now I got no more issues with it.
In a similar vein, I went with a Framework laptop. Expensive, but 100% modular and repairable, with an in-house secondhand marketplace. I have a gen 1, batch 2, and the thing is stunningly manufactured for a startup. Canāt say enough good things. Happy hunting!
If youāre on a small budget, look for older ThinkPad laptops, you can get them for good prices and in good condition and Linux works very well on them.
For mid-range try to find an older Dell XPS 13, they sold those as certified Linux devices nicknamed āDeveloper Editionā and with an Ubuntu LTS version preinstalled. I have one of those and I run Arch on it. It runs perfectly fine. Also: superb build quality! Itās a very great device.
Not all Thinkpads work equally well. For the best experience, get an all-Intel one, from one of the more expensive business lines, like the T-series. Consumer models are definitely worse, because employees of big Linux-using tech firms are getting the pro models.
I havenāt kept up with all the various lines theyāre up to now, but that looks about right. Also obviously doesnāt hurt to google the exact model. Someone I know got an old tabletty Thinkpad with a touchscreen (donāt know what model) and on that one the webcam doesnāt work on Linux, so something like that can happen.
I bought an E595 back then and it works great. But I dont know how the actual E series behave. There werent also no problems at all with Linux. More important is the question which wifi module you choose, and mine had one from realtek (there were no Intel Option sadly) and the wifi performance wasnt that great because of that.
Maybe itās fine with now, but I looked into a Ryzen Thinkpad a couple of years ago and Linux users reported problems with something (maybe power management?).
Also note that Thinkpads up to a couple of years ago (when soldering RAM became a thing) are mostly trivial to open and upgrade RAM / drives, so you donāt have to care about those and can pick up a bargain (look to T480 at the moment (not the TN screen tho), or whatever is 3 years or so old, as thatās the corporate fleets that are getting dumped onto the market).
And decently easy to repair / have repaired at a computer shop, wether its the battery, RAM, CPU, keyboard, screen, or any and I mean ANY of the external connectors!
This may be an unpopular opinion, but you can use pretty much anything you like, as long as it isnāt brand new or extremely old.
Even stuff with Nvidia GPUs and stuff.
Even MS Surface devices work decently.
Thing is, for a really smooth experience, where you donāt feel like a second class citizen, and everything works ootb, proper support is advantageous.
I have a Dell XPS laptop, and it works fine. Sometimes, the WiFi switches itself off, and I have to restart the connection, but other than that, everything is flawless.
Thinkpads are great too, since they are also used heavily in offices, where they get thrown out or sold cheaply. Maybe ask there.
I personally would recommend something that you can repair yourself, or at least change the battery and memory.
I wouldnāt recommend macs in general. Anything with a touch bar (intels from ca 2018-19 and on) are tricky to get to run Linux at all, anything with apple silicon is very experimental, and the older models have Broadcom Wi-Fi that doesnāt ship with drivers on any distribution I know of.
This is a pity because MacBooks pro from ca 2013-2015 are great; cheap second hand because theyāre out of support in macOS, good screens, excellent build quality and fast enough for anything you want to do with them.
Not entirely true, Iām running Ubuntu on MBP 2017 (non-Touchbar). WiFi works out of the box, only touchbar models have problems. They are using another antenna. Only thing that doesnāt work out of the box are FaceTime webcam and sound. There are drivers for those. One thing to note tho, Intel MBP especially those thin ones can get very hot and fans might blast.
Thanks! I thought the problem was the T2 chip and I thought the non touchbar macs had them too, but itās been a while since I looked into this. I have a machine with a broken touchbar that could plausibly run something that isnāt macOS and was very disappointed when I realised I essentially had to install special distros with some kernel patch or something on it.
Many years ago I tried it, but didnāt really read up on it. Wanted to back up my Piās sdcard while the system was running. I even fucking named that script āonline-backupā.
Now every time I ran that, after hours, I noticed my Pi was crashing, and never booted back up. I used chinese sd cards so I blamed it on them.
But this happened multiple times, just to learn I was using dd absolutely wrong.
dd was always a scary utility to me, and still is. I fucked up things with dd, regardless I quadruple checked everything š
but to answer the question; itās possible, but you really need to know what are you doing.
I am not sure if it is sorted now, but a couple of years ago Mint was plagued with issues related to wifi, so much so that I had to switch off from it.
There is, and there always will be issues, this is not going to change, much less in Linux where the hardware manufacturers are many, many times offering zero help and less documentation, but they pass, theyāre fixed, and things advance and improve all the time. This happens in every OS. However weāre almost certainly safe here from changes done just for the sake of profit (with extremely rare exceptions which get fought back by the community, Iām looking at you, Canonical!), so Iād say weāre MUCH better off on this side of the fence.
Interesting, it hasnāt been big enough an issue for me to get around to investigating yet but that might be the reason my my wifi speeds are lower than expected, stability hasnāt been an issue though.
Distributing software is not instantaneous. Assuming that Mozilla has already sent the update to flathub, it will take some time before itās validated and available for download.
If instead of flatpak you had used native packages, you would be in the same situation, as fedoraās update system keeps updates in testing until enough people say itās fine.
If you wanted to get the update as soon as possible, you would have to download the prebuilt binary from Mozilla, but then you would have to update manually and everything.
They share the same partition, but theyāre treated like independent filesystems. They can have different mount options, so on one you can enable compression but not another some you may want to disable Copy-on-Write, etc. Thatās also useful so you can rollback a system update without also rolling back your data or vice-versa. You can also store multiple distros each in a subvolume and boot different ones all while sharing the same partition and not wasting space. If you have multiple users itās worth having a subvolume each so each user can independently rollback their home directory. Maybe you want your projects on a subvolume so you can snapshot and btrfs-send it frequently.
I donāt use btrfs but on ZFS I have tons of datasets: steam library gets large recordsize and light compression, backups are heavily compressed and encrypted, VMs have a dataset tweaked for disk images, my music and movies also have a larger recordsize but no compression. I have one thatās case insensitive thatās shared with Windows machines and Wine stuff. I cap the size of caches and logs.
You are using Firefox installed through flatpak, but the base image also contains Firefox. Even if you remove it with rpm-ostree override remove it will continue be showed in the list of updates. Iām not sure for GNOME Software because I donāt use it. And what is for Signal, maybe itās a GNOME Software issue.
Iāve been using Mint for years now and Iām blissfully unaware of whatever drama is going on, or went on. Itās an OS people, not a vanguard of political or philosophical ideology.
Out of curiosity, since I switched from Windows to Mint recently so Iām not married to it just yet - what would be your recommended distro for Windows users that uses a better/newer tech stack? Mint worked out of the box for me, but if love to try other distros too if theyāre better.
I think OP is talking about Mintās Desktop Environment only.
If Mint works out of the box, pretty much any modern distro will. Itās about the kernel, not about an individual distro anymore. Thereās nothing much special about individual distros except UI, and package management, of which Mint shares the latter with any Debian-based distro.
For the most part there are two things that are important when choosing a distro the āstackā (kernel, drivers, security patches) and āpackagesā (how often your software gets updated)
For something like Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu LTS, it does major updates of the āstackā every 4 years with just security updates in the meantime. This means that newer hardware may not work fully due to lack of the latest drivers (and even then itās edge cases), but you are getting a very stable base. The packages may also not be the very latest versions. Something like flatpaks can be a healthy compromise where you are getting the latest package updates, but you still have a rock solid stack.
Something like Arch would update itās stack far more often but could potentially not boot with a newer kernel with your hardware eg more risky. Fedora is something that would be a newer stack than Ubuntu LTS but also newer packages. Wouldnāt be as new as Arch but would also be more stable as a daily driver.
To add to this, I found that Bazzite was a great middle ground for me, and it worked out of the box for everyday needs as well as gaming, even with my Nvidia card.
I am just now dipping my toes into the Linux desktop life with a Bazzite dual boot. Iām very impressed so far. The Steam Deck finally won me over on the Idea of switching.
I would look at OpenSUSE and try whichever flavor meets your needs. Itās more niche than Ubuntu but on vanilla installation is easily as user-friendly. The only downside is that if you start messing with stuff, tutorials are not written with SUSE/zypper in mind as often.
Iāve been running Tumbleweed with Nvidia drivers for about 6 months and have had basically no issues. Switch between X11Plasma/KDE when I just need something direct, and Wayland/Hyprland when I want to mess about and Iāve not had to blow everything away yet.
Well for Firefox, the one getting updated is the native rpm version which is part of the standard Silverblue install while the one already updated is the flatpak version. The native version is just called āFirefoxā while the one from flatpak is called āFirefox Web Browserā if I remember correctly. I have no idea why signal is showing up there. Maybe it is a bug.
Also next time a system update is shown in GNOME software, check using rpm-ostree status to see if any updated image is staged. If yes, then you donāt have to bother with gnome software - when you shutdown or reboot, the update will automatically be applied.
In addition to other peopleās comments, flatpaks are usually more up to date than their apt counterpart (expecially those from the debian stable repositories).
I run debian and I deliberately installed some software from flatpak (eg. Ardour and Guitarix) because the deb package is a whole version behind.
No. This gets painted on the framebuffer when the OS boots up, itās after firmware is done with it. Itās barely any different than when full graphics mode load up.
LogoFAIL is based on replacing the BIOS logo with one that will trigger the exploit in firmware code, before the OS even starts.
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