I’d say if you get a Ryzen, yeah. I have a P14s gen4 AMD that I use for my primary machine, and game on successfully. But I also have an old T14s gen1 AMD that work let me keep when I got refreshed. Right now I have Windows on it, to play some games that don’t work well in Proton, but it works fine in Linux as well.

If you can swing it, the T14s gen3 with a Ryzen 7 6850u was a truly excellent machine, it’s what I have for work right now. But we won’t see it coming off lease for another couple years, so it’s a bit early for good prices on the used market.

Just grab a 3-4 year old 13" business class laptop, like a Thinkpad X13. When they come off lease at 3-4 years, they hit the used market at pretty great prices. Some are in rough shape, but use trusted sellers who sell at reasonable volume, and their condition grading tends to be pretty reliable.

Be careful about upgradable RAM, or getting at least 16GB. It sounds like you’d be fine with 8GB for now, but 16GB will get you better life out of the machine.

You may want to replace the SSD straight away, depending on the write cycles. I’d probably just grab one with 256GB, and get a replacement straight away. Lenovo has all their hardware maintenance manuals online, to make checking compatibility and performing the upgrade pretty easy.

Hopefully they plan to stabilize what they see as core functionality, and then build out features. Some people won’t consider it ready until this or that feature is added, but many of us who just want a WM+ can start using it once it’s relatively stable.

Yeah, mine was pretty similar…

rm -rf / home/user/somedir

I think I realized what was happening somewhere in /etc, and stopped it maybe in /lib. But this was before /bin was a symlink, and I was jumping distros pretty constantly, so I just reinstalled. It was also before Ubuntu popularized sudo, IIRC, so I was probably su’d.

No, but you can boil/steam to extract flavor before frying. I do this when I make fried potatoes, and a lot of other things. I start the potatoes off in a bit of water with the alliums, butter, and spices added. I cover it loosely, and once the water boils off, the potatoes start frying.

This accomplishes a couple things. First, it keeps the potatoes from ending up hard (not raw, but hard), because the water draws some starch out and hydrates the potatoes. Second, it extracts the flavor from the allium (I favor shallots) and spices, mixing with the starch that ends up coating and browning. The starch being pulled out of the potatoes, but being left to coat them, also makes the end product more cohesive, with shallots clinging better to the potatoes.

Snapdragon Elite is going to be a rather sizeable step forward, thanks to the Nuvia purchase. Windows on ARM exclusivity is also going to end in 2025, and apparently both AMD and Nvidia are going to have chips ready. I’m hoping Lenovo and/or Dell will put some effort into Linux support once we have better chips, and that the likes of System76, Framework, and Starlabs are able to release ARM models.

So is pourover.

I think the confusion with espresso is that people think espresso should be a darker roast, and that remained pervasive even as other brew methods started to gain market share with lighter roasts. But you can absolutely make great espresso with lighter roasts.

Yup. I was a Debian guy back in the day, and eventually gravitated to Arch in it’s early days. Then I didn’t have time, so I used Fedora for pretty much a decade. Now I’m back to Arch, but have a project to spin up simple routing and NAT’ing VMs in lab environments, that can be used to demonstrate a variety of configuration issues on our platform. Would it be easier for me to do in Arch? Absolutely, both due to familiarity, and the fact that Arch doesn’t get in my way nearly as much as Debian does. But Debian is far more stable, configuration-wise, so I’m going that route so I don’t have to debug and tweak scripts every few months, or even weeks.

Unfortunately, the next Zenfone is looking to be quite a lot larger. I’ve been using Nexus and Pixel for years, and while my uses have always been rather simple, I’ve never had any serious issues aside from the LG bootloop on my Nexus 5x. Motorola phones get practically no updates, and unfortunately Xiaomi is a non-starter for those of us in the US.

That said, I’ve also been using Graphene, because I no longer tolerate the tracking and other productization of me. That’s not just a Google thing, nor limited to their phones, but they’re certainly one of the worst offenders. It’s ironic that their own phones offer some of the most freedom to remove them from our lives.

As someone who works for a very large company, on a team with around 500 people around the world, this is what concerns me. Our team will not be 500 people in a few years, and if it is, it’s because usage of our product has grown substantially. We are buying heavily into AI, and yet people are buying it when our leadership teams claim it will not impact jobs.

Will I be able to take a unit of 2 people down to 0 people? No, I’ve never seen a process where I could eliminate every human.

Socially speaking, this is also very concerning to me. I’m afraid that implementation of AI will be yet another thing that makes it difficult for smaller businesses to compete in a global marketplace. Yes, a tech-minded company can leverage a smaller head count into more capabilities, but this typically requires more expensive and limiting turnkey solutions, or major investment into developers of a customized solution.

Even if they are, it’s a drop in the bucket. And I imagine they’re less popular now than they were in the early days of Android, during the height of Cyanogen Mod, and others.

I say this as a Graphene user.

That’s unfortunate, Maps is near the top of the list of Google code I want nowhere near my phone. But now that the first domino has fallen, I’m sure folks are working on some de-googling.

I would love if the EU finds a way to force standardization of screen casting.

Does Android Auto in Graphene still require Google Maps to be installed, or is there a shim? If not, I wouldn’t be surprised if Calyx writes one, once they implement whatever black magic Graphene devs came up with to make AA work.

As a related example, Calyx has a Google Photos shim, so you can use other galleries with gcam. I just added Calyx’s f-droid repository, and use that with my Graphene install.

For now, I’m happy using my Mazda CX-5’s built in navigation with bluetooth audio. It’s nice enough to tile both side by side, and it’s less fiddly than AA. But my next car might not be as favorable, so I’m glad to have AA as an option.

Here here. After years of Nexuses and Pixels, I flirted with the iPhone for a couple of years. I finally grabbed a Pixel 5 earlier last year, and eventually a Pixel 8 to run Graphene. No play services, and I’m getting 3-5 days of battery life for a phone that I don’t feel constantly attached to.

I don’t think it’s the noise cancelling, I think it’s that headset manufacturers think gamers all want big boomy bass. My Sennheiser Momentum 4 have noise cancelling, and aren’t boomy in the slightest.

I also don’t think that it’s the closed back, though closed back are certainly capable of better bass than open back. My Audeze Maxwell also do not have boomy bass, and the Momentums are also closed back.

All that said, I agree that the sound quality of most gaming headsets is a mess, and I also prefer open back headphones. I don’t want to deal with cables anymore, though, so I’m hopeful that we start getting some nice open back headphones and headsets.

I love my Audeze Maxwell. I use it to listen to music all day while I work, and jump on calls throughout the day. It has excellent sound quality, and a built in mic that works very well. When there’s background noise, I pop in the boom mic and that mic’s noise cancellation is great. It also provides a little better clarity.

There’s both a 2.4ghz wireless dongle (which I plug into my monitor), bluetooth (which I use with my phone using LDAC), USB, and 3.5mm connectivity.

The battery life is excellent. I charge it weekly, and I really don’t need to.

They offer an Xbox and Playstation version. The Xbox version comes with an Atmos license, the Playstation version supports Tempest 3D sound.

The sizing adjustments aren’t great, there’s no telescoping of the ear cups. It just has a sling with three adjustments, by popping it into three different sets of screw holes. It’s ok, but not great, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to move back and forth, say, if you wear hats sometimes, because those holes will wear out. You aren’t supposed to remove the screws.

It’s also closed back, which is not my preference. I don’t have background noise, I don’t care about isolation. I prefer the sound of open backs, and they also provide more spatial awareness if you want to place footsteps.

Also, being closed back, and having a not so great ear pad material, they get fairly toasty. There are third party ear pads that improve upon this, but you can only do so much with a closed back can.

I think dynamic graphics switching would be far preferable for a desktop scenario, but for a laptop an eGPU is an attractive proposition.

It’s funny, I was really excited for Ubuntu when it first released, and actually quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, RPM distros seemed like an absolute mess, at that time. Now it’s the exact opposite. At least in regards to Fedora, it’s a very well thought out and maintained distro if you want things to just work, and Ubuntu makes me uncomfortable.

Don’t worry, you can essentially get the same shit CPU in the US by buying a Pixel.

I have an MBA, from a failed experiment with the Apple ecosystem. I love that it’s passively cooled, and will probably use it as a couch laptop with Asahi until the ARM market heats up in 2025 to 2026.