here’s a combo reply that doesn’t need to be there, but people have issues reading titles, I don’t know…

first off, do you realize where we’re at? normies don’t frequent lemmy, you have to put in considerable effort to find it and interact with it. your average lemmyst’s tech expertise is way, way above the average user, compared to say reddit or, heaven forbid, facebook or such.

I’m not answering dudes (no gender inferred) who are like “X years linuxing”. have you read the title of the post? can you deduce who it’s directed at? you’re seriously suggesting endeavor and arch and friends to people who’ve opened the command prompt a total times of never and don’t understand what regedit is/was for?

this is a post directed towards people transitioning from windows and macOS. people who have issues comprehending bootloaders and kernels and DEs, WMs, etc - and frankly, it’s 2024 and they don’t need to. people who close the laptop when they’re done and open 'em in the morning, basically people who don’t do a lot of sysadmining in their daily lives.

when was the last time you handed over a laptop with a fresh install to a linux illiterate being? I did so three times this week, and that’s below average; can’t get cheap SSDs right now to upgrade the the discards we get. my point is, I know what they come back with in terms of problems and grievances and none of them include “spending more time tweaking xorg.conf” or “learning systemd”. they have issues printing and sharing files and laptops sleeping/waking when they’re supposed to and counter-intuitive touchpad gestures and the like.

I’ve also had my share of devs trying to convert their issued laptops with fully functioning installs to this weird rice after reading DHH’s blog and the amount of lost time and productivity spent undoing that crap is staggering.

linux has this problem of experienced users raining downright useless and often counterproductive advice on noobs. the shit that works for you doesn’t work for them and you know that; the same way a racing car driver’s advice is useless in everyday traffic

this is not a “which distro is better”, this is which is appropriate for a noob. you want something that has a lot of attention devoted to preventing issues and that when you search “distro + problem” you get a solution, or close to it. it’s way more likely you’ll succeed with ubuntu than with opensuse.

once you’re an intermediate user and don’t need the kiddie wheels no more, you’re free to wander further, replace DEs, rice, switch distros, whatevers. but a noob will have his hands full with the transition and doesn’t need the extra baggage.

a user doesn’t discern user-facing and system apps, to them it’s a notification asking for a “software update” and that shit pops up daily. the mess that’s Gnome software, a horrid creation that’s OOB configured to prompt for reboots for every tiny little thing, because it updates system shit along with apps, is the number one complaint generator for converts; they’re used to a couple of those per annum (macOS) or per month (windows).

flatpak apps settings are in ~/.var/app and as such easy to include into backups.

I can’t tell if you’re serious, but if so - you’re the literal opposite of a noob transitioning and making their first steps. if you’re like any of the things you mentioned - arch, nvidia, xfce, let alone all of them combined - is something a noob should even entertain of doing, then I don’t know what to tell you.

the post is aimed at people a) transitioning and subsequently b) doing actual work, based on a bunch of people I’ve converted over. the input of dudes like you, while welcome, is in no way indicative of the path they should be taking.

if she can do the blending at home and everything else on the move, your options expand dramatically. namely, you can equip a laptop with an eGPU so you can attach a desktop GPU to it.

an ultralight used convertible 2-in-1 in the sub$200 region is plenty powerful for everyday use, drawing, whathaveyous. a $50 eGPU slot, a $15 PSU and a used 8 GB GPU in the $100 region will blow out of the water anything new for up to $1K and possibly beyond. double the budget for the graphics and there’s nothing comparable but the top of Apple’s line-up (no drawing on those, though).

don’t you need ROCm drivers for that sorta thing? I know you need 'em for OpenCL, Blender, etc., so I assumed it’s the same for ffmpeg, so I never bothered to try.

the distros you tried were… adventurous, to say the least, none of those would even occur to me. the my rule of thumb is:

1. fedora - for the newest hardware, you qualify big time, especially if RH was an initial choice for you
2. ubuntu - middle of the road, best for the majority of users, excluding newest or really old hardware
3. mint/debian - for older hardware

everything else is for hobbyists and/or special use cases, not for people expecting to do actual work.

nope

anyone dunking on the article, this is pretty far away from a how-to-lilst; it’s more of a “think about these things if you haven’t up until now” and as such a net positive. wrong community for it, though.

I used to run my stack on macOS and back then I used Catch to grab episodes of shows I was subscribed to via ShowRSS and Filebot to rename and sort the downloaded movies and shows in a Plex-friendly layout; Plex then grabs new additions autmatically, pretty sure you don’t need to rescan manualy.

like most here I replaced that mess with Sonarr/Radarr and eventualy switched over to Jellyfin when Plex introduced one “feature” too many.

everybody recommending mint skipped over the fact that this is a convertible, i.e. has touch. mint/cinnamon/mate isn’t terribly optimized in that regard and is rocking X11, a headache a beginner doesn’t need nowadays. mint is a phenomenal choice for older laptops, but not this one.

with a heavy heart, I’m recommending Ubuntu. it runs Gnome, which is a way more modern DE, runs on Wayland so has solid gestures and touch support, and lastly, it is very beginner friendly. you’ll be able to sort out any potential issue as that’s the most widely used distro and has solutions and tutorials for practically everything.

once you’ve crossed over and gain some experience, you’ll inevitably start banging your head on the ceiling (snaps and such). by then you’ll have enough experience and knowledge to move to something better.

also, a darknet diaries episode.

how about adding the cutoff limit in the ui then? find myself shrinking and shrinking an image until it gets accepted and then promptly forgetting what the limit was.

so, no need to resize images before upload on account of “image too large”, lemmy will handle that?

that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.

for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.

the whole apple-bad thing aside, you’re getting a non-expandable 8 GB laptop, of which a significant portion goes to graphics. that’s pretty low today, and it’s gonna be worse down the road. speaking of graphics, although Asahi has basic functionality, the driver isn’t 100% yet.

I hope you don’t plan on torrenting a buncha stuff, as the SSD is small and non-replaceable and after years of use has an insane TBW number.

the battery longevity is a solid argument but you are buying a 4 year old battery that will show signs of aging.

I am all for repurpose/reuse/recycle, but unless you get it for free, or close to it, this thing s a bad idea. get a similarly aged business-class laptop (thinkpad, yoga, latitude, elitebook, etc.) that you can cram full of RAM and storage and replace practically every component if it fails.

CZ and dd and other “it’s 1998” tools copy the entire disk. like, you clone a 500 GB SSD with 50 GB used to another disk, guess how much data gets copied? correctomundo, the entire 500 gigs. that’s not super-healthy for the new drive and it recreates the same volume UUIDs on the target disk as the source drive, so you’re left with a mess if you keep both drives in a system.

you have a modern tool at your disposal, the mentioned btrfs send subvol | btrfs receive subvol that copies only what’s used. GRUB (you can use this opportunity to switch to systemd-boot) won’t pick up shit, you need to install it to the new drive (and remove it from the old one).

eons ago, macOS had the SuperDuper! tool, a free utility that clones the entire disk, resizing the partition in the process and copies only the data and it does that from within the OS, no booting off USB installers and such. sad to say, nothing close exists over here, you’ll just have to get good at doing things manually.

look up btrfs send and receive. you’ll be copying data from the old disk to the new. prior to that you create the same layout on the new disk (efi, boot, btrfs with LUKS, subvolumes root and home). sadly, there aren’t any readymade solutions that do this for you. big time NO on clonezilla and friends.

Vista. Tried to make Ubuntu work for a while but that was a shit show back then… Moved over to OS X and I was home - a beautiful UNIX where everything just worked. Stayed there for close to a decade (Lion-Mavericks-El Capitan-High Sierra-Mojave), mostly on non-Apple hardware.

Sadly, the iOS-ization ramped up so I had to rip tons of iCloud related stuff everytime I did a fresh install and then Catalina killed off 32-bit apps and brought other irritants, so I tried Fedora 35 and escaped with close to no issues.

And here I am, on Fedora 40 five years later.

first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.

you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?