I’ll continue to call it forge joe. It’s more cute. It’s like “where do I put these files?” “Just give them to Joe, he’ll know where to store them”.

In ~/src Mostly because I’m too lazy to type “source”.

Might be related to those sleep state stuff that microsoft keep pushing. I think LTT has a video about how it causes battery to drain while off. I think the solution was either shutting it down while unplugged, or while plugged in or something. If you always shut the laptop down with the charger plugged in try to unplug the charger before shutting it down and see if it makes a difference. Or the opposite. I don’t remember which it was.

To be fair I haven’t configured a firewall either on my laptop. But that’s out of lazyness, not out of good practice. Good practice would be to have a firewall enabled. Just because something is unlikely to happen statistically doesn’t mean it’s bad practice to take steps to protect against it.

I fail to see why this is bad advice. Sure you could just disable the firewall on your computer on a local network. But that’s under the assumption that you can trust everything on your local network. What if it’s a laptop? Do you also trust any public networks you may connect to on the go? Having firewall both on the router and on your computer provides an additional layer of security, and I think that’s good advice in general. You can for example set it up to only allow incoming connections when connected to your home network for example.

Oh that’s good then. I think they stopped using whitelists a while ago, so if it is slotted you can probably replace it with anything. Maybe they reversed course on soldered modules then, or perhaps it only applied to some models. I looked into specs of the T16 at some point, and that one had soldered wifi module.

A lot of the modern thinkpads have the wifi module soldered to the motherboard nowadays unfortunately. Sad that they would use these crappy realtek cards in the first place as well.

Yeah the thought is that as long as my patch applies without error, I would get the latest kernel automatically built and can just update my laptop normally with pacman. And since I have a server anyways I might as well use it to compile the kernel at night. I’m also thinking of doing the same with some aur packages as well.

I use a custom kernel on my laptop. I just modified the PKGBUILD of the official arch kernel package, and added my patch as a file. Then I could build a proper package with makepkg. I’m planning on setting up my server to automatically build the patched kernel and serve it in a private arch repository, so I don’t have to compile the kernel on my laptop regularly. I’m waiting on forgejo (git forge I host on my server) version 9 to be released first, as it should support arch package hosting by then.

For old not very demanding games by todays standard, yes. As long as you get something new enough to have proper support for Vulkan API (such that DXVK would work). As others have mentioned, AMD have better iGPUs than intel, so definitely look out for that.

I wished tiling windows would work like snapping of floating windows, but more powerful. For example instead of snapping only to the edge of the screen, I would for example hold alt while dragging a window and would get a preview of where the window would snap to depending on where I’m hovering. And that it would resize the other windows accordingly.

Having to remember or customize a billion keyboard shortcuts for switching between windows and rearranging the grid, makes tiling window managers DOA for me. I don’t have the time/energy to set it up or practice the shortcuts.

I don’t know specifically about the T470, but if you have an nvidia GPU, you might have issues depending on how the display outputs are connected to the GPUs. I had a T420s at some point with an nvidia GPU, and it was a PITA to get the display output to work on linux. I had to permanently enable the nvidia GPU for that to work (cutting battery life in half), because the display output was connected only to the nvidia GPU. I swore to never buy an nvidia product ever again after that experience.

I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a few videos about windows users switching to linux mint lately. Having to update the kernel for the computer to work is a common occurrance. IMO the newest available one should be the default one. We should strive towards giving new users the best possible first impression of linux.

They really need to update Mint though. Sure it is good… on old computers. Anything made the last couple of years will have issues due to an ancient kernel and mesa. We should stop calling it stable/lts and unstable, because users will always pick the one called stable, even if the ‘unstable’ one is the one that would in most cases work the best for desktop linux. Or at least we should separate the kernel and mesa away from the rest of the ‘stable’ packages, and include recent versions of that by default, to not scare away people with driver issues.

Yeah linux support for ARM SOCs is not ideal. There might be some fork of the kernel working with specific proprietary driver blobs. But in a few years its basically abandonware.

RISC-V is what we should try to make happen as a replacement for x86, instead of yet another proprietary IP.

The scary thing about this is thinking about potential undetected backdoors similar to this existing in the wild. Hopefully the lessons learned from the xz backdoor will help us to prevent similar backdoors in the future.

It’s not useless. It’s a gateway drug for getting into linux. “But can your windows PC do this?” is a great way to recruit people to try linux ;)

Not 100% sure if it is the same issue as you linked to, but I have an early Ryzen 7 1700 that has a hardware error (google “ryzen performance marginality” to find info about it) causing it not to work properly with linux. I never bothered to RMA my CPU. I’ve made it kinda work anyways, by disabling cool and quiet or whatever it is called, and set a fixed overclock to compensate for the lack of turbo after that. The idea is that the CPU should always run at a fixed clock speed instead of clocking down to save power when idle. Haven’t had any issues with this CPU for a while now after I did that.

BTW I upgraded my desktop with a 3900x and put the 1700 in a server. Never had any issues with the 3900x on linux, so getting a newer generation ryzen for you PC second hand or something might just fix it as well.

This many extensions in gnome will be fragile. Extensions have a tendency to stop working on gnome updates. The more extensions, the more issues you’re gonna have. Though will probably work fine on a stable slow moving distro like debian or something.

Personally I use 3 extensions: dash to dock, app indicators and desktop icons.

They went from doing some communication secure with signal, to doing no secure communication, because of a rug pull of a genuinely convenient feature. The problem with communication apps is that it is almost impossible to convince anyone to use anything they haven’t heard about, if it is not very convenient. They’re not going to use a separate app just for communicating with a single person/a few people.

Looks like RCS might be viable in the future when it works on both iphones and androids though. I just hope that it doesn’t all go through googles servers.