I've been wanting to find an alternative to Thinkpads since Lenovo bought them, but despite them not being what they used to be, I just haven't been happy with any alternatives. I'm hopeful for Framework improving on their modularity, and the System76 in-house design that's in the works has me intrigued.
Right now I'm looking forward to their eventual redesign of the Z series. I doubt they'll do it, but I'd love a light workstation class version of the Z16, with slightly higher end graphics, and a vapor chamber. I'm also hopeful that they work on Linux support for their ARM offerings, and bring back the X13s that they offered with Snapdragon 8 a couple years back.
Unfortunately, they have minimal support for US frequencies. The US market is dominated by disgustingly expensive flagships, and severely compromised midrange and budget offerings.
The cool thing about Bazzite is, you can run their Arch container in Distrobox on any distro you prefer. I just have to run it with Podman, games load super slow using Docker.
I'm really looking forward to having sane functionality without needing a dozen extensions, and still have a couple things I just can't quite reconcile. I tried to like Plasma, but once again, I just can't stand using it for more than a month or two. And I don't have time to get a more basic compositor working the way I want, like I did back in the Fluxbox/Openbox days, especially with how complex things have become.
I think they meant build as in configure your environment, not build as in from source. If that's the case, they're not exactly wrong. But once you get the bulk of it to your liking, it's mostly fun little tweaks and accidents. It's just a lot at first.
There's a very good chance the key is stored in the EFI, making this the absolute easiest part. I'd just make sure to get the Windows installer on a USB stick before installing Linux, if there aren't any other Windows machines around. And also make sure I have a wifi/ethernet driver available before reinstalling Windows, if it comes to that. It can be tricky to install Windows without network, these days, and even if you get past that (which I'd recommend, to bypass a Microsoft account), you still need it once you're in the installed OS.
Yeah, I played with Silverblue for the first time a week or two ago, when I decided to move back to Gnome from Plasma. When I realized that I'd need to layer adw-dark to get rid of the light settings panel in Gnome Console, and then layer in aptx and ldac support, and then some drivers for hardware accel in Firefox... I came to undestand that truly approaching this as minimally layering, and instead properly relying on flatpak and toolbx/distrobox wasn't going to work out. Instead I'm just going to get anxious every time I have to say, 'well fuck, I guess I have to layer this too.'
That and I really don't like the mess of a filesystem. So back to Arch, with some things learned to keep stuff I don't like out of my base system. I can use a Bazzite-Arch container for Steam, to avoid having to enable multilib, for example. Well, if I can figure out the performance issues, anyway. And I know I'm weird, but I'd kind of like to avoid using AUR on my base system, and Flatpak kind of terrifies me for the reasons you mentioned
I do look forward to an immutable future, but I don't think it's going to make me happy for some time. Maybe Nix or GUIX, but that sounds like a winter project. I know some folks use an Arch base with Nix layered on top, but that rather sounds like the inverse of what I'd ideally want. It seems like the beauty of Nix is that you don't have to worry about layering, because YOU declare the base?
It's rumored Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM that's expiring in 2025. Supposedly, Nvidia and AMD both have chips being prepared for that.
Microsoft is very much trying to push ARM forward, in order to compete with heat, noise, and battery life of Apple laptops and tablets.
This isn't a phone focused product, and the thermal envelope is quite a bit larger. It's meant for laptops, and maybe some tablets will see it. These are Oryon cores from their purchase of Nuvia, and I don't think a whole lot will transfer over.
Yeah, bcachefs is still very very young, and not ready for much of anything beyond tinkering. But I'm definitely excited to have a native filesystem that's designed with tiers in mind.
It is 16 years ago, that's pretty old in terms of technology.
It's also an evolution of ex3 and ext2, and ext if you want to consider it's very short lifetime. In fact, the lead developer stated in 2008 that it was meant as a stop gap, as it's based on old technology with some new features, and that BTRFS was the future.
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.
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.
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.
I've been wanting to find an alternative to Thinkpads since Lenovo bought them, but despite them not being what they used to be, I just haven't been happy with any alternatives. I'm hopeful for Framework improving on their modularity, and the System76 in-house design that's in the works has me intrigued.
Right now I'm looking forward to their eventual redesign of the Z series. I doubt they'll do it, but I'd love a light workstation class version of the Z16, with slightly higher end graphics, and a vapor chamber. I'm also hopeful that they work on Linux support for their ARM offerings, and bring back the X13s that they offered with Snapdragon 8 a couple years back.