Honestly, I never really use it untethered enough to give you a good answer. But I can say that notebookcheck’s battery tests are pretty good, and they test enough laptops to compare well across a large number of models and generations.

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.

Ok, but you’re still dealing with the guest desktop as a windowed container. Unity mode in VMware presents individual windows to the desktop environment, not the entire desktop.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-8C477788-7700-4030-8C4A-039C02AABB74.html

Things like Distrobox will obviously be better for most Linux on Linux workloads, but for BSD or Windows, it’s pretty damned cool.

But they don’t break windows from within the guest, into the host desktop environment. You see the entire desktop as a container.

It really depends, but generally, I want to use as much Linux as possible, and for me a bigger part of that is the UI than the hypervisor.

Microsoft pays extra attention to Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Not my first choices, but in particular you’ll see stuff like AAD auth on Azure VPN supported on Ubuntu LTS. There will also be some work going into proper Intune support, if that matters.

I would prefer Fedora or Debian for a more stable environment, and use Arch at home, but we have to keep interoperability in mind sometimes.

Another thing to look into, and I really hate to since Broadcom bought them, but you can run Windows inside VMWare, and use unity mode to break individual windows out into your DE. Beware of the new licensing.

What’s your use case that OSMC and LibreELEC don’t work? I think those are going to be common recommendations, so knowing why they don’t suit you would be helpful.

I was surprised to see it doesn’t suck anymore, I’m using it with my mailbox.org and old gmail account. The state of Wayland native email clients isn’t great, I’m really not sure what I’m going to do when I eventually switch to Cosmic.

A couple others, if MPD looks appealing, are Navidrome and Mopidy.

Yeah, I’m with you. 2001 and DDR… there’s something else going on with the failure to boot. I don’t think the Pentium 3 ever supported DDR, so this is probably a Pentium 4. If truly a model released in 2001, it would be Willamette, but that required RDRAM. DDR support was introduced with Northwood in 2002. On the other hand, it could be the P4 that was new in 2004, Prescott, and the 2001 statement comes from the first year the P4 was released.

Same here. I feel like Sid is there to catch problems, so devs and maintainers use it as such. Arch aims to be stable, though obviously not to the degree of Debian Stable, and so devs and maintainers aim for that. If one wants the Arch equivalent to Sid, there’s the testing repo, but there’s much less of a delta between stable and testing in Arch, so there isn’t much point unless you actually want to help test.

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.

I hope you leave easter eggs

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 really hope System76 and XFCE both hurry up.

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.

So they say. I’ll believe it when I see it.