And Linux Mint DE instead of NixOS and Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora 😊

Almost sounds like it, these were all recent experiences. I’ve been looking at Lenovo previously as a potential “look-at-first” brand, can’t really say goto since if there was something more fitting I’d drop them in a heart beat back when looking for laptops but their offerings were cheaper and on paper didn’t seem to lack much.

I had my internship there this year. The issues with my lenovo laptop started in 2021 after I bought it, managed to get my money back after 2 years late last year and decided to go full time on the Steam Deck as my personal computer alongside a portable monitor.

The HP laptops all felt pretty solid when I set them up, the company gave me a spare Lenovo laptop that was just laying around that worked okay, forgot which model but I think it was probably around their 1200 euro range probably. But the HPs didn’t have much in terms of keyboard flex and the trackpad felt really nice, however I was only having it for a couple of hours before they were being repackaged to get to the customer so no real time to judge anything.

I ralso recognised having brand loyalty towards prefab computers were pointless pretty early on. Everything from the lack of upgraidability to the lack of easy access to repairs and sending enormous parts for minor things just wasn’t cutting it for me. I’m glad with my Steam Deck now actually, with my monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse I can manage my own IT stuff at home from anywhere and do my dev stuff pretty comfortably. Knowing I can also go to ifixit to buy spare parts whenever I want is a nice bonus!

As for HP being shit in every other area, yea, I’m always gonna keep in mind to not buy their printers and stay away from them as much as possible.

What did add up on Lenovo’s side was their customer support in my country. They were very kind and helpful regarding my issue but I couldn’t sit around and wait for it to be fixed and them trying 100 different things.

But thank you for telling me your experience, I’ll make sure to keep it in mind when getting my job and hopefully have the opportunity to be able to give someone something that won’t break!

Would love to hear your thoughts on HP. I had an internship at a IT company doing general setup and maintenance for businesses IT and since each consultant managed their own customer they often stuck with their own brands.

Having setup some of these I often felt like Lenovo was hot garbage, I’ve had a lenovo laptop with terrible manufacturing issues and the company I was at too and some of my friends. I would feel lucky if I get a Lenovo laptop without errors. Dell I haven’t heard anything bad of in general, one employee usually preferred buying them and then one other preffered HP. There was one or two people there who ordered Lenovo simply because they were so much cheaper for the specs but build quality and other components are just so garbage.

Of course, I’m not speaking about their budget 300 euro to 700 euro laptops now. The ones I was able to handle and setup were all 1300 to 3500 euros.

Did you drift with the packages?

This is true.

I wish I could upvote twice, you’re gonna save me so much time.

That’s so weird, I decided to completely drop Google as my primary a while back because by the end, the only search results I got was literally only spam and SEO spam/adware links on anything I ever searched. DDG didn’t have any of this. Could search how to do something on a Foss project running on my server and 80% of the results were spam links and the other weren’t even relevant to the search. For me Google took a shit, Bing was slow and DDG was just a good in-between.

I grew up with the cheapest and most worn down vacuum cleaners. It was awful, everything from having to pull it out of a cabinet to finding an outlet and, having bad suction, awful cleaning heads and annoying hoses.

So when I got my own apartment and worked for a bit I decided to go all in on a Dyson Absolute V12 Detect. It’s actually very painless and super quick to vacuum now. Also a bit fun.

With a rechargeable battery it’s wireless and the battery lasts me about 4 vacuuming sessions in my apartment, no keeping track of vacuum bags and filters. All in all it takes me from touching my vacuum to being done cleaning my, albeit 1 room apartment, about 10 minutes. It’s great!

Basically Biltema Körv

Pop is growing in popularity for all the right reasons! I hope it works out great for you! A few tips I would give is to make sure to do backups and look into things like Timeshift to make unexplainable errors and potentially wonky package installs easier to undo!

I’ve been in your shoes many many times. My needs and expectations change every few years. I recently bought a Steam Deck and have been using an OCI image called Bazzite based on Fedora Silverblue the past few weeks and it’s been great exploring Linux and feeling the real ownership of the things I run and host.

I’m a tinkerer at heart, have two Raspberry Pis, one running as a router and the other running as a general server paired with my Synology DS720+ as a self hosted everything else, email, online docs, cloud server, Jellyfin, etc.

If you want it to be easy look at some distros like Bazzite which has a good gaming focus. Or Linux mint which is great as well.

Look at alternative software for what you’re using, music software has Ardour for a DAW or Audacity/Tenacity for general audio editing. Kdenlive works great too or davinci resolve if you really need more oomph.

AMD hardware always works better with Linux so if you have or can upgrade to AMD stuff make that a bigger priority especially since they focus more on FOSS software and release a lot of things as such.

You don’t have to feel guilty about not cutting off some programs and web apps. As a photographer I’ll probably never be able to leave Adobe sadly but I’ll just accept that.

Don’t be afraid to try things and experiment, it’s the fun of it. Looking and trying new things. It’ll be a great way to get back into it!

I’m thinking it’ll probably be way better for sustainability as well. Since I do need the performance I do and the Deck hits that performance within a good margin having to spend €12000 on a laptop with good build quality and good specs just for it to break or have some shit happen to it after the warranty is out feels like shit. So I’m thinking because the setup is semi-modular and each of the part of the setup isn’t super expensive it can still be worth it in the long-ish run. My steam deck break? I buy a new part from ifixit. The monitor breaks? Worst case scenario I can get a new one and possibly an upgrade since this market is new and moving. Keyboard and mouse breaks? Easy to replace that too.

Downside of course being the clunkiness of having to carry around all that and the time spent setting it up rather than just getting the laptop up and fold it up.

Something along the lines of 2K or more with at least good colour accuracy would suffice for me! It’s all I need for the photo editing part. Having plugged it into my 4K TV it went very well. All the UI elements and such displayed perfectly and smoothly for the most part. So 4K on the Steam Deck is most definitely doable! At least if you disregard gaming that is which isn’t the main goal for this project.

Does your steam deck output to 8K when you plug it into the TV? How are UI elements and FPS on that resolution for you? Would be fun to see where the limit would be.

This has been my primary concern with getting this to work as well. If I do decide to go with the portable monitor which I’m leaning more towards now it’ll for sure be a bit more clunky to get out the monitor, plug in the steam deck, pull out a mouse and keyboard and make sure their paired and then get going. Our trains here are very spacious most of the time unless it gets crowded so for the most part that itself wouldn’t be too big of an issue but depends on how much effort I feel needs to go into getting everything setup for my usual 40 minute train ride to get a few write-ups on my assignment done. Realistically I would probably skip the monitor and get the keyboard out and use the touchscreen thinking about it.

That seems to be the gist for most of the portable displays and lapdocks available. I know there’s a few portable displays that can charge the Steam Deck properly but they’re usually far between. I’m slightly put off from getting 1080p since it’s been a very long time since I settled with that resolution and to me just feels slightly too little. Especially when I’m gonna edit photos and browser the web. I’m gonna check around a bit for 4K portable monitors since there doesn’t seem to be any brand ones that are 2K.

Bazzite seems very interesting. Thanks for the link! HDR to me is a bit of a second priority, it sure is nice but it doesn’t make and break anything. Currently trying out Windows on the Deck and seems like HDR seems to be broken for me there. Sadly the option on my TV to fix it seems to be greyed out in the settings.

My desktop experience so far has been great actually. While the CPU itself isn’t as strong as my previous 5900HX the GPU performance is indeed noticeable when running about in some software. It’s a great try-out at least!

And as someone whose been distro-hopping for 10 years and tried loads of different setups it’s been my personal conclusion :)

In the end the browser isn’t everything, it’s also UI of the desktop environment and the file explorer and how some things are handled. That I find more comfortable with Windows, but when I manage my servers I love using Linux and when I need to do web-dev stuff too.

It wouldn’t be for gaming. Mostly running VMs, managing school assignments and general browsing and voice chatting. If I do end up booting up a game I wouldn’t mind utilizing FSR as much as possible.

I don’t intend to do any gaming on an external monitor I think. Even if I do I think I’ll be happy enough with FSR!

You don’t seem to be alone in disliking the build quality of the NexDock. I wish more people had input to the UPerfect devices but their displays seem good. I’ve heard of more “proper” display brands doing some portable displays too that I can look into to get a bit more reliable warranty and such.

Have you found yourself preferring using an external keyboard and mouse with the NexDock? That would probably be the biggest downside to the solution of using the monitor only solution. Having to chuck with me a Bluetooth KB+M.

I’m glad for your input tho, helps a ton!