What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.
Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.
Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.
FYI, 14” is sort of the new 13.3”. A lot of newer 14” laptops are the about size of an older 13.3” laptop, but just have less bezel.
Same situation as with 16” vs 15.6”.
AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.
NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.
Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!
Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.
Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.
Do note that the yt-dlp version in stable will go out of date; I recommend installing it from the backports repo so it keeps updating.
I also use XFCE. My desktop’s currently on Forky and went through all of Trixie, and the emdia keys have worked fine.
I’ll have to fiddle around and see what’s going on, though it may take a few days to get back because I’m starting school again soon, so I’m quite busy.
For reference, what programs do you tend to use with media keys? For instance, VLC, Firefox, etcetera.
What desktop environment are you using?
And maybe just give device model for good measure.
To be fair to macOS, it’s still Unix-based, which at least makes it less miserable for development than Windows.
I would still go for Linux any time, though.
You’re right in some ways; Windows is closer to a microkernel than Linux, though it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the philosophy of - there’s supposedly weird things like drawing calls in the Windows kernel that should be in microservice, I’ve heard
However, I wouldn’t necessarily call microkernels a detriment; in fact, Linux is a bit of an odd duck for going monolithic - modern Apple operating systems also run on a microkernel. Monolithic is an older architecture, and there are worries about the separation between components and system resilience e.g the webcam driver can’t crash the whole kernel.
In practice, it’s less of an issue, and there really aren’t any open source microkernel operating systems that are practical for production desktop and server use, which has a microkernel though there are certainly solutions for embedded systems.
QubesOS is built on Xen hypervisor, which uses a microkernel design, but Linux is then run in multiple VMs on top of it, which makes it more of a technicality in my eyes. RedoxOS also runs on a microkernel and is certainly intended as a desktop operating system, but its hardware support is limited; GNU Hurd is even more limited in that respect and not really usable.
Neat. I love Debian, but its documentation is crap! I hope this works out and I can see an improvement.
I think you’re mixing up Office 365 and Office Online.
Office 365 is a subscription for Microsoft Office that includes access to both the full, more powerful desktop Office applications and the much less powerful Office Online.
Though I don’t think it’s even called Office 365 anymore, but I don’t respect MS enough to bother to Google what they’re calling it now.