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”.

ffmpeg can use several different AV1 codecs, with varying levels of performance.

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!

What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.

I wasn’t intending to convey this timeline could be a dream; I was moreso saying I thought my mind had made up this Microcenter to distract me from this dreadful reality.

I could have worded my initial post better.

All I was thinking about watching this video is “I wish they’d open a MicroCenter in Phoenix”; I’d had a blast visiting the Tustin location after seeing TMBG in LA this May.

I then googled it for fun and found out they announced they’re opening one a month ago! I checked national news to see if I was in some jolly alternate timeline (unfortunately, no) or dreaming, and it appears not.

Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.

Just curious: which AV1 encoder were you using?

I ask because librav1e and libaom performance is dismal, but libsvtav1 can at least do ~1.00x speed, which is impressive considering how complex the codec is.

That’s not to say I don’t welcome improvements, though I think AV1 Vulkan requires hardware support I don’t have on my RX 580; it wasn’t until the RX 7000 series that AMD cards started getting hardware encoded support for AV1.

Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.

Thank you for saying this before people started crying, “Linux is getting encrapified!” without understanding what the article was actually about.

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.

Technically Raspbian Jessie, I think- I was gifted a Pi 3 in ~2016 and fiddled around with it for a while. I also made some cursed choices, at one point running Windows 10 IoT Core on that thing… though luckily not for long.

In 2017 or so, I started toying around with Ubuntu in VMs. It wasn’t really until 2020 or so that I started trying other distros; Debian Buster was probably the first non-Ubuntu distro I’d tried (excluding RPi stuff), and I mostly stucked to Debian besides one Arch install.

At a certain point in 2022, I found myself using Unix tools so much I was starting to wonder if I should just use Linux instead of Windows. It was at this time that I tried NixOS in a VM for the first time and thought, “Wow, this is cool… I’m sticking with Debian, though.”

Around that time, I threw Debian Testing (then Bookworm) on a second 256GB drive, ostensibly as a “test run” for daily driving Linux, and by “test run”, I mean I de facto quit using Windows; a few months later, I opted to use dd and copy that “test install” over my Windows install on my bigger 1TB drive (of course with sufficient backups so I could copy my Windows files over). That install is still the one I use on my desktop today and has just transitioned into Debian Testing/Forky*

*A name I quite honestly hate, mostly due to the fact that Forky represents everything wrong with America today the Forky Asks a Question shorts beat out Steven Universe Future for an animation Emmy, though honestly, I don’t know else what I was expecting to happen.

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.

The big 2⁵!

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.

I mostly agree with you. However, I think there are some caveats to upscaling; there are so many lazy “4K AI UPSCALE BEST QUALITY” videos online that just don’t look good and were clearly put there just to get views.

However, I’ve also found they have their uses; for instance, I wanted to laser cut a TMBG Flood logo once, but there were very few good images online that traced well in Inkscape. I ended up doing an AI upscale of the least terrible one with a white background, and that traced pretty well in Inkscape.