In practice, Machine Owner Keys are a thing, though it depends on Microsoft still signing shim, I believe.
Having Microsoft in the chain of trust rather than a standards body is rather concerning, though.
Modern hardware absolutely should have an encryption processor; TPM just isn’t great.
Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?
It gets less essential the more memory you have, though I have 32GB of RAM on my desktop and still have 32GB swap space, which is probably way overkill, but I can afford it for now become I have a 2TB SSD that still has several hundred gigabytes left and could probably have a bit freed. With the memory shortage caused by "artificial intelligence" companies, I may have to go less crazy on the storage now, though.
That just sounds like insufficient swap space, honestly. For part of the summer of 2024, I used a laptop from 2016 with 8 GB of RAM as my man portable devicr. The swap partition size I used was fine for most things but a but small; however, I’d occasionally run Spleeter and run out of memory, leading to the issues you experienced, which were alleviated by just adding a temporary swap file. Before that, I used a gen 1 Surface Go, also with 8 GB RAM.
I don't like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.
I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.
Wait... It's a used stick? For future reference, that's a key piece of information. I'm guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I'd guess there's a solid chance that stick is just worn out.
I'd disagree on the 16GB part. It's nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.
I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn't murdered that many people yet.
I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.
I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.
Most software on that front works. I usually just use Cura for slicing.
Honestly, AV1 software decode isn’t that bad on most recent hardware. My desktop with 2018 hardware does it just fine, and so does my 2023 laptop.
USB Wi-Fi adapters are usually fine. I do have a PCI-E Wi-Fi card in my desktop from my Hackintosh days, though, which has gone unused since my home now has lots of ethernet connections.
The year of Linux on the desktop was the friends we made along the way…