And if any gaming will be involved I’d probably steer clear of either of them, since the available graphics driver will likely be outdated rather quickly.

Ubuntu LTS (and therefore Linux Mint) gets updated graphics drivers between releases, so the situation is not too bad. I’d say it’s good enough for most people. You only really have an issue if you want to buy a brand-new AMD/Intel GPU.

For comparison, Debian 13 (and LMDE) currently ships the Nvida 550 driver, while Ubuntu 24.04 ships the 580 driver.

Upstream, the Fedora KDE Plasma edition is also doing well. Nice to see that within the first release after promotion to a full edition.

I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239

That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.

The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/1l707yc/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.

It’s either +44% (from $70) or -31% (from $101). Percentages are weird…

Yes, and it should probably be cheaper in Poland. But it’s really 17% more expensive in this case, not 44% (or 30% as the article calculates).

The Polish price includes 23% VAT, no?

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

How is this too long? I would consider it a reasonable amount of time to receive security updates on a computer.

I have a notebook that I bought in 2012. It can run Ubuntu LTS 24.04, which is supported until 2034, without issue. There is no indication that the next release will stop supporting this hardware. I don’t see why Microsoft couldn’t provide this.

Yeah, I looked into ARM or RISC-V options for a NAS, but ended up going with x86. Upstream Linux support is just a hard requirement for me. As the author points out, the support that you get from the SBC manufacturers is lacking at best.

Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).

Rust actually doesn’t guarantee that there are no memory leaks. I think the more important memory safety improvements are regarding use after free, out-of-bounds accesses, null pointer issues, and double free problems.

For me, it’s mostly interesting because it brings automatic tiling to a desktop environment. System76 has previously implemented this as an extension for Gnome, but they haven’t been too happy with that approach.

I think would also be good for the Linux Desktop community to have more than 2 strong desktop environments. Hopefully this would incentivize app developers to account for more than just a singe DE.

Interesting, I didn’t know that but it seems like Wayland is indeed CSD by default. However, all relevant compositors except for Mutter support xdg-decoration (https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1). So in practice it’s still only a Gnome issue.

No, that’s Gnome, not Wayland. KDE still prefers SSD on Wayland.

I feel it has gotten much better in recent years. The first time I tried KDE 5 it looked weird to me. But now I acutally quite like KDE 6. Or maybe I’ve just learned to tolerate it…

What kind of issues did/do you encounter?

The VS Code/Codium essentially provide a separate development environment within the flatpak container. All the tools there, and the shell are separate from your actual system. There are some ways to work around this (https://github.com/flathub/com.vscodium.codium/blob/master/README.md). I gave up on the Flatpak and installed a native package. Containers are nice, but they have their limitations.

Sure, Bazzite has some nice features. But, I would argue that apart from the Nvidia images (there is no AMD image) those are all minor things. And for Nvidia cards, the Mint Driver Manager is pretty good. I don’t think any of those differences play a role here.

In general, I think it’s really unhelpful to present “switch to my favorite distro” as the first step in troubleshooting an issue.

Try CachyOS or Bazzite!

Bazzite, sure, but it’s not gonna magically solve these kind of issues.

However, if one is struggling as a beginner with Linux, I would strongly advise against switching to an Arch-based distro (CachyOS). Arch is great, but this is not its target audience.

I strongly disagree with u/brucethemoose here. You wrote below that you’re currently using Linux Mint, which is a great distro for beginners. In my opinion, Bazzite offers nothing essential that is not available on Mint. IMHO, the easiest ways to play games are:

• Use Steam to play your Steam games (native or using Proton). This should just work (on both distros)
• Use Heroic Games Launcher to play games from GOG, Epic, or non-store games. The recommendation is to install the Flatpak version, which is available on both distros. Afterwards, the setup step is to install a Proton-GE version before you can play your games (https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/wiki/Linux-Quick-Start-Guide).

You can - of course - still switch to a different distro if you like, but this is not necessary or helpful to run games.

In the specs for the Laptop 13, it says:

Fingerprint Reader (2nd Gen)

Same for the 16, but not the 12.

Unfortunately, the former is not possible due to asinine requirements by the HDMI Forum: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected The only option is to use DisplayPort instead (or perhaps an adapter).