• 4 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Sorry for the loss OP.

    Maybe not what you want to hear right now, but I’m really glad Steam cloud minimises the impact of a loss. When I had a Nintendo Switch I was terrified of losing hundreds of hours of Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon progress. Losing a Deck is obviously a financial loss (and the emotional attachment of someone special giving you yours), but at least there isn’t insult to add to the injury the way Nintendo would do.


  • You’ve basically described my situation exactly. I built a PC 6 months ago for Linux. I distro-hopped for a good while and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now I’ve put OpenSUSE on my laptop too. I would highly recommend it.

    I went for an AMD GPU and have never had any problems with it. Linux is not as painless as Lemmy would have you believe though. Be prepared to learn some hard lessons and keep your data physically disconnected from the PC while you do it.

    You’ve asked about WiFi drivers further down…on my PC, the only distros that had the correct WiFi drivers out of the box were EndeavourOS and ZorinOS. The rest all needed wired LAN to get them going.





  • Home life is hard for tech enthusiasts. I’m tech support for the extended family and they’re pretty intolerant of my tinkering with things. Normies actually get quite upset really quickly if tech doesn’t immediately work the way they want. My router started having some problems that it took me a while to get to the bottom of, this messed with my Plex server availability. My wife got so frustrated with her TV shows not working when she wanted that she’s pretty much sworn off Plex and wants streaming subscriptions restarted.

    This is where the huge popularity of Apple and their walled garden comes from. When I got married I made clear that I’m not doing tech support for any Apple products, so she switched to Android.

    I’m not brave enough to push my wife to Linux (I’ve only found it to be acceptable for daily use very recently myself; and even then it was painful), when the things she uses the most are MS Office and Teams. She gets triggered if she ever needs to use my Linux computer.




  • I know it has the ability to, but I don’t recommend it. I’ve recently commented on this so I’ll paste it here:

    DO NOT dual boot as a beginner. I did this when I started and would screw up something with the bootloader and be unable to boot one of the OSs (data can still be copied off, but installed app data isn’t easily recovered). Being a noob at the time, I even accidentally wiped the wrong drive during a distro hop.

    For a beginner I would recommend you remove your Windows SSD and keep it safe in a drawer. Or clone the drive first. Then you can mess around all you want while keeping your original SSD safe.if the data and OS/app installs are valuable then don’t fuck around learning a new system with the drive in situ. Certainly don’t try to learn to partition and dual boot off the same drive. The noob risk is just too high.

    https://lemm.ee/comment/13744698









  • DO NOT dual boot as a beginner. I did this when I started and would screw up something with the bootloader and be unable to boot one of the OSs (data can still be copied off, but installed app data isn’t easily recovered). Being a noob at the time, I even accidentally wiped the wrong drive during a distro hop.

    For a beginner I would recommend you remove your Windows SSD and keep it safe in a drawer. Or clone the drive first. Then you can mess around all you want while keeping your original SSD safe.if the data and OS/app installs are valuable then don’t fuck around learning a new system with the drive in situ. Certainly don’t try to learn to partition and dual boot off the same drive. The noob risk is just too high.


  • I used eBay so I could get a refund if the laptop wasn’t as advertised. I spent weeks looking at new listings looking for a good deal. I eventually found an amazing deal from a hospice that was selling excess stock. I’ve worked in a hospice before and know this would have only ever been used sparingly in an office and be very well looked after.

    On eBay I would avoid anyone who hasn’t written out a complete description and detailed pictures of condition and specifics. Like the other comment says, the BIOS being unlocked is very important. Read descriptions carefully. People fall victim to buying expensive things that can’t be returned because it was mentioned in the listing (e.g. buying a box only for a very expensive price). For any laptop I find, I search for forum posts from other users about how that model works with Linux and videos for a teardown to make sure that RAM, WiFi module, etc can be upgraded. Make sure the charger is included.

    Search eBay for “8th Gen 13 inch 16GB”, then sort by lowest price for buy-it-now. That’s what I did for a number of weeks. Got one for myself and a great one for my dad as well. Good experience both times.