First off, so few models of Chromebooks even allow you to bother sideloading or outright install a Linux distro over ChromeOS. Eventually, Google cut that stuff out so now almost every Chromebook now won't allow you to do that without going through some Developer Mode loop that makes you think you'll get by.
Secondly, Chromebooks are just e-waste. That's their design. They're only made to be online-only "laptops" with just an expiration date attached to them, that date being how long Google wants to bother supporting it with security updates provided something doesn't break down first within the first two years.
Thinkpads have more longevity, they're built well and they're meant to go the distance. Chromebooks has been and will continue to be a joke.
Easiest GUI toolkit I’ve used was NiceGUI. The end result is a web app but the python code you write is extremely simple, and it felt very logical to me.
Davinci Resolve is not a solution for at least 60% of the people who would move to Linux. The new version has trouble working on Debian-based systems (even with the various scripts and workarounds that exist), and it requires an nvidia card with lots of GBs of VRAM (while it does work on Windows with Intel/AMD without big problems). So I’d never suggest Resolve to someone moving to Linux unless they’re going to use Fedora, and have a recent nvidia card. For everyone else, there’s KDENLive and Shotcut. Which are way worse in the things they can do compared to Resolve (especially when it comes to professional color grading and audio plugins specifically for human speech), but that’s the situation we’re in.
Although I have to say, kdenlive surprised me very positively, when I tried it out recently. DaVinci is still king imo but in a pinch, I‘d prefer kdenlive over Avid Media Composer any time.
Yeah…I was dual booting to test mint, then accidentally wiped my windows drive when I tried out bazzite and went ‘welp, guess this is my life now’ and haven’t gone back to windows lol
The Steam Deck exists. It runs Linux. It’s even an actual computer that you can plug a display, keyboard, and mouse into, and then gawk at the wonderful KDE Plasma desktop environment that this thing ships with. Sure, not all Steam games work on this thing, but you still have access to a lot of stuff.
But I suppose some folks will insist to install Windows on it, or get a Windows based alternative.
Bazzite has been astoundingly good for me. The only games that have issues are usually those with kernel-level anti-cheat and tbh I wouldn’t play those anyways if I was running Windows (although I understand that’s a deal breaker for some).
Support for Bazzite is fantastic too. Kyle and the rest of the folks on Discord are amazing!
The only game I am having issues with is fallout london. For some reason, even with a dlss upscaler mod, it runs at half the fps that it does on my windows :(
date is the command for setting the system date and time from the command line. Nothing to do with formatting, beyond the fact that it presumably applies system locale settings when echoing date-time info.
Second sentence of the description from the man pages, “Otherwise, depending on the options specified, date will set the date and time or print it in a user-defined way.” not sure what they were on about.
Right - I’m just saying that it’s super annoying that people point out times that llms have been wrong as though humans are never wrong, or even aren’t wrong frequently.
I get that. It’s funny I think I’ve gotten advice in the past to always check the results of search engines because they can be wrong (as in teachers said it to me) or things about Wikipedia being unreliable. But nobody does those things nowadays. Perhaps someday LLMs will be good enough that we don’t need to check them either.
Most Chromebooks from the last 5 years have 8 GB of RAM and 32/64 GB internal drive. That’s not enough to satisfy the kind of user who would buy a Thinkpad.
I have 4 Chromebooks that I converted to Linux, from the era before the aforementioned, with 4 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal space (and just 1366x768 res – kdenlive and some cad apps don’t fit in that res, not even some of the DE pref panels fit!). At 16 GB internal disk, only Debian fits in there properly. Mint and all ubuntu-based ones, or fedora are either out of space, or with only 1 gb left (Debian leaves 8 GB free). Also, it’s near impossible to use a modern web browser to browse the web with 4-5 tabs at the same time at 4 GB of RAM – you always hit the swap sooner than later. So it’s literally bare bones experience.
The newer Chromebooks, with 8 GB RAM and 32/64 internal space are definitely better, but still nowhere near the “modern” specs required to run Linux properly (especially if you also want to do some video editing). In fact, look at the Cosmic DE. While it’s new, and without any code fluff, it requires a minimum of 2.4 GB of RAM just to boot (which is more than gnome/kde).
So yeah, Chromebooks have nothing on Thinkpads. Not for the kind of users who buy thinkpads anyway.
Then again, I’d rather go for a much “cleaner” approach and suggest new users to “unlearn” the bad habits learnt by using Windows. Which is the “click once and forget” mentality, along many others.
I’m not a thinkpad guy, but I thought one reason for people liking old thinkpads is that the old ones came with cpu’s that predate the intel management engine.
Exactly. The ARM Chromebooks can run coreboot in a lot of cases. I am not sure about WiFi and GPU acceleration but at least those can be isolated if necessary.
I think they mean powerful as in compute power, and since they’re designed to be thin clients, the answer is no. They’re universally underpowered the day they come out.
No way. My T420 with a 3.4ghz 4c8t i7 absolutely outpaces any celeron POS Chromebook. Either you don’t have much experience with good (T-series) Thinkpads or you don’t have much experience with Chromebooks.
Honestly, I just kept some distros on a USB disk with Ventoy (amazing software for booting ISOs from USB) on it and booted them up repeatedly until I felt comfortable and found my favourite.
I really don't think waffling around on Windows trying open source alternatives is the answer. Look up what the alternatives are, then boot up a live image and download them. Try them. Then switch if you like it.
This is coming from someone who used Windows from 1999 until 2023 and planned a transition to Linux over time (about a month) using a spreadsheet. It really doesn't have to be complicated or difficult; I'm not a programmer or anything, I'm just a former Windows power user.
Windows is no longer for power users. With each version, it kills the power of users some more, and asks for more powerful hardware like a hungry beast.
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