Technology

I wish I could get an x201 with an identical form factor and keyboard, indicator lights, etc, but otherwise upgraded components (cpu/ram/display/ports). That is my dream.

I also have an x201, but it runs too warm and too noisy for me to keep up with it. I now have an M1 Macbook which I use Asahi Linux and macOS on with about a 50/50 split. But the x201 feels better in the hand and on the desk.

I think, realistically, anything up to 10 years ago can run most distros. Some better than others, of course, because of the DE load.

I’ve got kde neon on a 2013 MacBook Air and it’s great. I also have put Ubuntu budgie and SDesk on an old HP Chromebook with 4gb of ram. And, obviously the 16gb disk is crippling, but it runs better than expected haha.

It really is. I don't get the love for the tabletish gnome interface everyone is using.

I get why some people like it, for sure. I'm just surprised so many "power users" seem to.

<2 seconds from powered off to being able to start to open e.g. a web browser?

If so that is indeed truly shocking. Curious what your stopwatch says from powered off to a homepage loaded ready to use.

Booting from a full power off state?

Did not see “faster than Commodore 64!” coming!

Tried it this week, video signal would cut off as soon as there was a tiny bit of load on the GPU (like intro videos in a game would be too much)... I'll have to experiment some more but you can't blame people for using the option that just works when switching OS probably means troubleshooting for tens of hours...

I installed Bazzite earlier this month as a dual boot and have been very happy with it. A lot of stuff just worked on bootup, haven't installed a single driver, and that's including my AMD GPU, just installed a game, plugged in my controller, and it played. Most games seem to run better than Windows. Fullscreen mode is a lot less annoying to tab out of - there isn't the annoying momentary black screen, tab just happens. OBS seems to finally be on the level of Windows performance, although some of my favorite extensions are Windows-only. That's been something of an annoyance, a lot of stuff is Windows-only, but usually if I Google "[program] Linux" I'll get a workaround or substitute. I still leave Windows installed because of anti-cheat nonsense, but I rarely boot into Windows anymore.

Kind of meandering but that's my experience so far. Overall pretty satisfied.

If it runs on proton it runs on mint

The only issues I've had are the companies who refuse to enable the Linux versions of their Anti-Cheat, everything else has run and run better than Windows

I use a 2080ti and even with that negative it only took about 15 minutes of fiddling to get my GPU working just fine in everything

AFAIK they still benefit from custom kernels, but don't require them. I believe support continues to make it into master, so it likely won't be the case forever.

Zorin is another sexy option.

For some reason, Mint doesn't provide access to the power profiles out of the box... no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called "Power Profiles" and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

It's also got so many features that just make sense, like extending to separate monitors being automated, or when you download multiple files they're automatically zipped to conserve space.

I did love Mint.

I got my aunt's laptop on Mint. Was unusable with Win 10, like click the start button, wait 4 minutes and then the start menu opens. Took right to it, especially since she's been using an Android tablet for just about everything so she knew what an app store was. "Linux calls it a software manager" was all the training required.