The Post Ninja
Latitude is my rec, not XPS. IDK why the XPS always seems to have issues.
As for “stupid hybrid graphics”, my HP Gaming 15 is a few years old now and still kicking… AMD/nVidia GTX dual graphics. Only reason I had to replace a board was because the heatsink wasn’t attached properly from the factory.
And yes, it is a linux laptop too.
DELL Latitude laptops. They’re designed for work, come with repair guides from DELL, and have upgradeability. The 5310 is one of the longest-lasting laptops for battery life you can get for $200-300 on ebay (over 8 hours battery video streaming, I’ve done this) that still has half decent specs (16-64GB RAM upgradeable, upgradeable m.2 wifi / bt adapter, NVMe SSD upgradeable, i5 10th gen)
Runs fine on Debian Stable
It’s alive and kicking on standalone android thanks to Quest, but soon more android headsets that aren’t from meta are about to come out. Being able to PC VR with these is always a preference.
also the lack of good VR support - it’s a super hacky mess to get it working right
Remember kids, whatever Linux Distro you installed, it’s the wrong one…
Meanwhile in Fedora KDE, I have the opposite problem… The system straight up ignores my monitor sleep settings, and something as quick as grabbing a water and coming back to everything in sleep mode on a desktop is kinda a problem when I am relying on the system not going sleep due to a running task.
Yeah no, I’ve used Slackware back in the day… there is no getting back the whole weekends lost chasing dependencies and build dep reqs.
Looks like I need to consider flipping back to Debian again… it’s always beeen a Stable relationship…
I would that too
Pretty much… as long as you didn’t do any custom kernel stuff or driver blacklisting or any other underhood voodoo with the boot system.
That only matters if there’s anything to optimize by source compilation. If the program doesn’t have optimization features in the source, it’s wated time and energy.
LCARS interface… that is something I haven’t seen in a loooooooong time
Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…
GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.
Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.
Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.
So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.
RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.
Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.
As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.
Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.
Indeed it has. Also, ground vehicles?!
Descent, Freespace 2, these two games open sourced a long time ago. They’ve been updated by the community over the years, and ascended far beyond where they started.
flatpaks are designed for gui apps, and due to packaging dependencies, they are extra heavy in disk space. flatpaks are also most often installed on the user, not systemwide, so no root permissions needed to install.
apt installs systemwide exclusively, but can have a much smaller download size if the dependencies are already installed. Apps sharing dependencies means much less disk space. cli is supported.
It’s an “immutable” Fedora, that is, the system comes as a read only image, kind of like how android works. Anything you do is “layered” on top of that image. This means you have to actually try to break it, because you can undo anything you did to break it by simply not booting with the extra layer(s).
You’re encouraged to install in userspace flatpaks instead of system-wide rpms where possible, as system-wide rpms means adding a layer on top if the image as it is.
Your next step is to Arch
Leave it as is. Some people go tin foil hat about Secure Boot being insecure, but that’s like saying “don’t lock the bottom lock on your door because someone can use a lockpock in 2 seconds”.
Fedora works fine and automatically with Secure Boot, and that is an important defense against on-boot malware injection.