Like, why the heck is Oracle still on this Earth? The only thing I can think of is MySQL, to which my response is, "Just use MariaDB."
data1701d
joined 6 months ago
To be fair to Phoronix, I hardly think they're the worst offender in Linux space; I find their Linux coverage to be the least terrible online. They cover new kernel and software developments pretty well.
Other Linux-focused sites seem to mostly consist of clickbait "Ditch Windows 11 headlines", fleeting Linux apps, explaining something that there are already vast amounts of quality articles for, and/or thinly-veiled advertisements.
That is not to say Phoronix is perfect; I don't necessarily enjoy having to run my ad blocker there. However, it's not like it's different on other sites. Comparatively, I find Phoronix to be a decent quality Linux outlet.
To be fair, it would be weird for Google NOT to support Linux, as I believe they use Debian Testing internally.
Personally, I find Debian pretty good these days. I used to default to Testing, but I've gravitated towards stable.
Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and Steam, almost any distro works.
That first part sounds like software/firmware stuff like mine, but the second part almost sounds like an antenna design issue.
Used to use Red Hat. This theme is for people who have nostalgia for back when Red Hat wasn’t a puppet of the blue monster - not the one that likes cookies.
Thunderbird’s not bad, but I usually use web stuff.
I have an existing iCloud e-mail that I haven’t had the time to switch off of. I then use G-Mail for school stuff - since I’ve signed away my soul to Google anyway, might as well use what they have to offer.
Maybe one day, I’ll start my own personal e-mail utopia, nut that day is not today.
Maybe Fedora?
Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.
Who would have thought? I’ve hardly touched Windows in over 2 years (mostly other people’s computers and the occasional app in my GPU-accelerated VM) so I haven’t kept up much.
According to the repair manual, my Wi-Fi card is actually replaceable, at least physically. I don’t know if Lenovo still does BIOS whitelists of cards like they used to (I think they did remove it a few years back.), but their OEM parts website has a diverse selection if this fix were ever to break.
I’d say other than the bottom being a bother to remove (and the keyboard not being designed to be replaced, though after some research, it seems possible), this is a surprisingly repairable laptop for how recent it it.
I totally agree with you on the Linux side. However, I first got into Linux by using it in Virtualbox on Windows. In the Windows world, as far as I know, it’s the easiest-to-use free-as-in-beer^1^ hypervisor, so long as UEFI support has improved since I last used it.
1: I say this because of the non-libre extension pack.
Another update: https://startrek.website/post/13283869 I found a fix for my issue. I'm annoyed that I had it in the first place, but I overall still like my laptop.
Important update in this post: https://startrek.website/post/14075369 I still consider this a good laptop, but this is an important fix if you're using this on Debian 12. When 13 comes out next year, the out-of-box support of this laptop should be basically perfect.
Anyhow, back to the original post: I recently got a brand new laptop, a Thinkpad 21JT001PUS, to consolidate/replace my array of various on-the-go-Linux devices, and I have to say, I'm impressed. I know Thinkpad and Linux aren't news, but for such a recent device, I am surprised how well it works. The price wasn't bad (which makes up for the fact that it's a Zen 3 chip with DDR4, in my opinion), it has good upgradability (I'll touch a bit on my experience later), and hardware support was really good.
I initially tested hardware support with Debian Testing Trixie XFCE (as that was the Live USB I happened to have on hand, since I often test devices and also keep it around as a backup for my desktop, which runs Testing). At first I couldn't get it to boot, but then I found the BIOS setting to enable non-Microsoft certificates. After that, I booted in and found everything worked out of the box (except the fingerprint sensor, of course, but that's extremely rare for any laptop anyway). However, after experience with my previous portable devices, I learned I prefer stable distributions on those, as during some parts of the year, I can go months without opening the laptop.
Thus, I retested with Bookworm. Almost everything worked still, except for the Wi-Fi (which seems to have been introduced in later kernel versions). Luckily, this thing has an ethernet port (From which it is HECK to remove cables - I've found I had to twist the end up a bit to get it out), so I was able to do an install and then add the Backports kernel to get Wi-Fi working.
One minor issue I had (a software fault rather than a hardware/kernel one) was Bluetooth headphones, but as it turned out, it was just that PulseAudio was installed instead of Pipewire, so after switching, it worked flawlessly with Blueman).
As for battery life, so far it seems okay (as I write this, it says 3:29 left at 51%), but I haven't rigorously tested it yet (though I threw on the usual tlp and stuff like that for good measure).
For performance, I once again haven't tested it too rigorously, but I did play some Civ VI, which it was keeping up with just fine.
The upgrabability of this laptop does have one caveat, though. The bottom is a bother to remove, and most Youtube crap conveniently glosses over them. For one, some of the screws would get loose but not come out all the way. I eventually found the trick was to throw some pry tool under the screw head to hold it up so I could get it the rest of the way out. After they were all out, the bottom cover STILL wouldn't budge. This too ended up being a matter of jamming a pick in one corner of the case and running another one to slowly pry up the bottom case on all sides. I lost a plastic tab or two in the process, but that doesn't show up on the outside, and I think 24 GB of RAM (and 2 TB of NVME 2280 storage + 256 GB, the Windows drive that I left in the 2242 bay) will be plenty for a long time.
Overall, I would say this is a great laptop for those who don't want to go the route of purchasing a used laptop for Linux. I'll say an 8.5 out of 10 due to the hard-to-remove bottom cover and weird ethernet port (Update: 8 out of 10 now due to the nasty Wi-Fi bug I had to fix with a few module options, see posts linked in top of page).
Here's the Linux Hardware probe: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50fb1862
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In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don't know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.