americans can design garbage, so can chinese. or the opposite.

Could be they’ve improved! I didn’t have much trouble opening mine but I did need a special star bit for the screws, and they tended to fall out without thread lock.

dell is manufactured globally, in china and in other places. probably lenovo too.

I think the thinkpad T14 series is pretty mainstream for linux - except for the Gen6 snapdragon one. Arch wiki thinks the gen5 will work

I had a top of the line Dell (precision 5520) that I bought with Ubuntu on it, so it ran linux very well. But there were quality issues, mainly the battery swelling up and making the keyboard stop working. Then the screws for the case fell out and the hinge kind of broke, and the power connector stopped working, as did its replacement. I think you aren’t really supposed to work on the dells yourself as it had special screws, not plain philips heads.

Maintainability on thinkpads is better, in general. And I like the way the computer feels more - just better design.

it does nothing. might as well not be plugged in. at this point I don’t remember what killed it. maybe trying to transition to another os.

my pinebook pro has been bricked for at least 3 years now. still dead.

you can tell the difference because of the names

inkscape? which is free

the battery replacement is non trivial. the glass back is incredibly fragile and is glued on.

that said, they can be got new-in-box from ebay.

turns out its a mastodon account. if you’re on mastodon paste that address into your search

nixos:

https://github.com/kuruczgy/x1e-nixos-config

nixos, same as the last 10 years. more packages than ever on it, and I’m better at wrangling nix stuff now for my own packages. Besides my personal machines, I also use it to admin several servers for work. All the config for all the machines goes into git and I can see exactly what changed and when, configuration-wise.

terminal only

Snagged a thinkpad today for just over 100$. Guy mentioned it was because of windows 11. Its hippie christmas for linux!

The consensus seems to be that implementation inheritance leads to code that is difficult to understand and difficult to reuse. Its perhaps the main reason C++ is banned from the kernel.

people performatively declaring they are going to Linux doesn’t bother me at all. its good press, builds its reputation. people try new things for deep reasons sometimes, but also for casual curiosity and fashion following, and that’s ok.

With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.

to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW

for xmonad commands. also windows-p is dmenu.

I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.

Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.

As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.

For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.