“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
I think you’re mixing up Office 365 and Office Online.
Office 365 is a subscription for Microsoft Office that includes access to both the full, more powerful desktop Office applications and the much less powerful Office Online.
Though I don’t think it’s even called Office 365 anymore, but I don’t respect MS enough to bother to Google what they’re calling it now.
What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.
Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.
Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.
FYI, 14” is sort of the new 13.3”. A lot of newer 14” laptops are the about size of an older 13.3” laptop, but just have less bezel.
Same situation as with 16” vs 15.6”.
AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.
NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.
Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!
Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.
Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.
Do note that the yt-dlp version in stable will go out of date; I recommend installing it from the backports repo so it keeps updating.
I also use XFCE. My desktop’s currently on Forky and went through all of Trixie, and the emdia keys have worked fine.
I’ll have to fiddle around and see what’s going on, though it may take a few days to get back because I’m starting school again soon, so I’m quite busy.
For reference, what programs do you tend to use with media keys? For instance, VLC, Firefox, etcetera.
What desktop environment are you using?
And maybe just give device model for good measure.
To be fair to macOS, it’s still Unix-based, which at least makes it less miserable for development than Windows.
I would still go for Linux any time, though.
You’re right in some ways; Windows is closer to a microkernel than Linux, though it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the philosophy of - there’s supposedly weird things like drawing calls in the Windows kernel that should be in microservice, I’ve heard
However, I wouldn’t necessarily call microkernels a detriment; in fact, Linux is a bit of an odd duck for going monolithic - modern Apple operating systems also run on a microkernel. Monolithic is an older architecture, and there are worries about the separation between components and system resilience e.g the webcam driver can’t crash the whole kernel.
In practice, it’s less of an issue, and there really aren’t any open source microkernel operating systems that are practical for production desktop and server use, which has a microkernel though there are certainly solutions for embedded systems.
QubesOS is built on Xen hypervisor, which uses a microkernel design, but Linux is then run in multiple VMs on top of it, which makes it more of a technicality in my eyes. RedoxOS also runs on a microkernel and is certainly intended as a desktop operating system, but its hardware support is limited; GNU Hurd is even more limited in that respect and not really usable.
Neat. I love Debian, but its documentation is crap! I hope this works out and I can see an improvement.
Maybe it’s because I only use stable on my laptop with Flatpaks, but honestly, Bookworm never got that crusty to me until recently - it feels like new software versions didn’t introduce a lot of must have features in the past two years. Only hiccup was I had to install the backports kernel to get Wi-Fi working.
I used to use this, but I always found it really janky - window boundaries not updating, weird graphical glitches, etcetera.
It was especially annoying to use with Photoshop and GPU acceleration (I do GPU passthrough to my VM).
In the end, I just abandoned it and just used the monitor the VM’s GPU is plugged into.
As a completely new user who’s self-described as “not very tech savvy”, Arch is probably a terrible idea, and you should switch distros.
I really like Debian, but something like Linux Mint or Fedora might be wiser for you; all three hold your hand more, which would be very important in your case. Fedora and Debian specifically are designed to work well with KDE, although Fedora will have newer versions.
You certainly seem willing to learn (you got through the Arch install process), and I think you still have a great opportunity to enjoy Linux, but considering you’re calling the terminal emulator “Konsole”, your self-description is probably apt. FYI Konsole is just one application to access the terminal, kind of like how Firefox and Chrome are both web browsers, but you don’t use “Chrome” to refer to web browsers.
No.
I usually just use Bash; there’s a certain level of complexity where it begins to be more reasonable to just use Python.
Yes and no. I think connotation is important here; “stable” means different things in different contexts even within computing, and they both denote different but important things - kind of like free of cost verses freedom.
In the distro case, people need/want a distribution where they know a new version won’t come and break their config when they update at 2 AM and miss it in the changelog, and “stable” has been agreed upon as the term in that context. Of course, that can change, as all language does, but that’s just the current convention.
Also, Debian tends to make sure software is not unusable before stable is shipped (the Nvidia thing is an anomaly I’ll explain below); while they sometimes fail, as you’ve hinted, I find it quite rare that it actually happens. Also, the “static” of Debian isn’t absolute; if something really has a breaking bug or a security vulnerability that affects overall system usability (basically something that can’t be fixed by installing a Flatpak), they will put out a fix, like with the Linux kernel or a web browser (via the security repo, included by default in all installs).
Additionally, looking at this changelog, while the Nvidia situation is objectively a bit embarrassing, it looks like they were working on getting them updated, but just didn’t have much luck - I’m guessing a breaking change in the software that made it harder to package. Also, it’s in the non-free repo, which is on the back burner compared to the rest of the distro - something in the main repo will usually only be at most a few months behind at time of distro release.
I mean, I think static is stable.
I feel like stability in some contexts means more than just the software not crashing often (although that is the big part); it means being able to expect the behavior to stay the same until you’re ready to upgrade to the next release and confront the new behavior all at once, sort of like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7.
There’s certainly a place for rolling release - I use Debian Testing on my desktop - but I certainly appreciate being able to go a month without opening my laptop without getting a daunting notification like “There are 1578 updates available “ (on my Debian 12 Thinkpad, it’s usually only double digit, very minor updates).
Unrelated thing - just found out something funny.
Apparently, Torvalds himself uses a 580.
I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.