powertop and the kernel are pretty good on their own these days and for everything else there’s https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/systemd-suspend-modules/, it should be negligible if you’re using it correctly
my point is that I honestly would not recommend linux to anyone who isn’t willing to consult https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management
Dell is honestly the only OEM I’ve liked for a few years now, I don’t think there’s a better option than that Windows 10 XPS 13
Resurrecting this thread because as an early-career Systems Librarian I want to really boost my computer skills, and using Linux every day on a laptop seems like it’d force me to improve my fundamentals.
Does anyone have any recommendations on what laptop to get?
What distro should I run if I want to learn the ins and outs, but starting as a relative newbie? I’ve got a little bit of experience running an Ubuntu Mate VM, and for work I’ve been using PuTTY to SSH into a CentOS server to do Drupal stuff in the CLI (mainly updating Drupal, installing/updating modules, messing with CSS, sometimes doing file permission stuff). That’s basically my level of experience.
if you want something that actually Comes With Linux, Dell XPSes are pretty good about that nowadays
if you’re really interested in building character you should probably just install it on what you already have though. just use stock Ubuntu until you develop opinions about package management and then switch to Arch
should this go in another forum?
my linux take is Debian Good, Based On Debian Good. I dunno that I would ever use any package management but apt ever again. I would find a distro that is a) close to default Debian b) has very lightweight window management and apps. In the past this was crunchbang for me, idk what an equivalent would be nowadays.
if you really want to Build Nerd Character i would say do what i did: install slackware and live without working sound drivers for six months. (in my defense i was 16)
… fwiw i think windows 10 is Great And Fine but i understand the dark nerd impulses that lead to such threads
i installed arch once on a laptop at the urging of legacy poster ‘parkbench’ and never figured out how to auto boot a desktop or throttle the fan speed before i got fed up
i tried antergos years later at felix’s recommendation on a desktop and scrambled my OS drive
so far so good
arch seems like it’s popular and neat huh? what’s the deal with it @Felix
the documentation is second to none and the community package repository is way, way simpler in practice than having to configure 2 dozen PPAs for user-maintained packages and get inevitable versioning headaches if you have exotic needs, plus you’re never at the victim of whatever dumb shit canonical decides needs to go into upstream ubuntu on an annual basis
if you Work With Linux you kind of can’t help touching every ecosystem (which is why it’s good in general to like, know how systemd behaves and all of that), you’ll almost always be in an RPM environment on production servers, if you use a lot of modern tooling maintained by reluctant cross-platform developers who follow canonical’s documentation you’ll have to manage snaps too, everything is dockerized now on top of that which isn’t a bad thing, and while I think there are good reasons that debian package management is the most common overall and I’m happy to work with it on a raspberry pi or w/e else I encounter some exotic linux, I much preferred arch + upstream gnome to any alternative for desktop Linux when I was using it for a good chunk of the 2010s. my experience was that way more packages were more predictable and better maintained on bleeding edge than they were in “stable” releases.
you seem to be on a minimal computing kick between the memory management in chrome and crunchbang and tbh I don’t see much practical use for that with a modern desktop workstation, but it’s a much different matter if you’re working in a deliberately constrained environment (like if I bought one of those raspberry pi keyboard cases that look like a BBC micro I’d be psyched to run #! on there)
is this just pronounced HASH!
like, do you have to excitedly shout HASH! whenever you mention it
there used to be a Linux distro called crunchbang which was their name for that pair of symbols
MCDONALD’S
i’m not really on a minimal kick to be clear, the browser RAM thing is specifically for gaming purposes, i have no intention of getting back into linux anytime soon!!! i used crunchbang in like 2008 or something.
i have a thing for software that’s well optimized that’s mainly the deal. visual minimalism actually works really poorly for my brain most of the time
“deliberately constrained environment” is most devices I own, to various degrees
even so I wouldn’t be surprised if windows is far more efficient in practice at swapping (or paging in windows terms) memory when you want your browser in the background than most of these apps are – declared memory usage for anything that runs off of chromium or any of several other modern frameworks is basically an optimistic lie, anything running javascript will allocate way, way more than it needs and garbage collect later
I like well-optimized software too but in modern terms for desktop apps the only optimization that really matters is CPU (this is why I am an electron apologist) – your storage should be infinitely fast or close to it, your memory should be within the same 8-32g pressure range as everyone else’s that these apps are actually tuned to operate within, your UX is down to preference, and most non-arch linuxes don’t give you comparable preferences to other desktop environments
i gotcha, that makes sense. yeah CPU optimization also something i want obv. I’m on 16GB RAM, SSD, blah blah the main constraining factor on my main laptop is my old GPU and old CPU.
Everyone’s going to be wild in this thread and make a case for weirdo shit, but just go with Ubuntu. You can find deb packages for most the stuff you want to install, and if you can’t you can find the packages you need to build the source of whatever it is with nicely written tutorials.
yeah, that’s basically what i have been doing for the last 12 years. Install the LTS [u]buntu-version and keep it updated, that’ll cover most of the use cases or normal™ people.
If one is into building bleeding edge drivers or programs, they’ll be pretty likely well versed enough to be able to stab ubuntu in the back, install arch and galaxy-brain their way into realms that the ubuntu-proletarians will never reach.
But yeah, 2nding the notion that if you don’t wanna compile CPU-fan drivers, ubuntu/derived OSes are your best bet for “it works” kind of low-maintenance.
just never, NEVER, NEVER compile radeon-drivers yourself and expect them to work. That is the 21st century equivalent of voodoo-magic going on into your box, and you don’t wanna mess with the powers that be.
… if you still decide to do so, use the cmd-params
- - accident=waiting2happen
octothorpe!
re-resurrecting this’n cos i’m lookin down the barrel of a new machine (probably a framework laptop unless something else comes up before the end of semester) but unlike last time i bought a laptop i now find the latest windows version actively repulsive instead of simply uninspiring.
my plan atm is to download a few images and boot from a flash drive to give them a try, but my main concern is: i’ll need to spin up windows applications on the regular for work (marking student games) and while i’m perfectly happy to look into dual-booting and wine and so on, i wondered if there is a better way to go about it? could i boot a windows vm when necessary or is there a particular distro which makes running windows applications easier for whatever reason etc etc.
for context: i’ve never stepped outside the two big OSs and i only have a rudimentary familiarity w the command line, but i wanna learn! i’d like to get to a point in my life where i rely on proprietary software as little as possible.
i’ve always had a wonderful time just plugging in commands from tutorials online but i haven’t touched linux in maybe a decade
virtualbox has always worked for my (old windows) game environment emulation needs. i haven’t tried it with a current version of windows, or with games that rely on specific versions of other software installed to run, but i think it would still work, just more complicated to set up.
