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.

Yup. I was a Debian guy back in the day, and eventually gravitated to Arch in it’s early days. Then I didn’t have time, so I used Fedora for pretty much a decade. Now I’m back to Arch, but have a project to spin up simple routing and NAT’ing VMs in lab environments, that can be used to demonstrate a variety of configuration issues on our platform. Would it be easier for me to do in Arch? Absolutely, both due to familiarity, and the fact that Arch doesn’t get in my way nearly as much as Debian does. But Debian is far more stable, configuration-wise, so I’m going that route so I don’t have to debug and tweak scripts every few months, or even weeks.

Unfortunately, the next Zenfone is looking to be quite a lot larger. I’ve been using Nexus and Pixel for years, and while my uses have always been rather simple, I’ve never had any serious issues aside from the LG bootloop on my Nexus 5x. Motorola phones get practically no updates, and unfortunately Xiaomi is a non-starter for those of us in the US.

That said, I’ve also been using Graphene, because I no longer tolerate the tracking and other productization of me. That’s not just a Google thing, nor limited to their phones, but they’re certainly one of the worst offenders. It’s ironic that their own phones offer some of the most freedom to remove them from our lives.

I think dynamic graphics switching would be far preferable for a desktop scenario, but for a laptop an eGPU is an attractive proposition.

It’s funny, I was really excited for Ubuntu when it first released, and actually quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, RPM distros seemed like an absolute mess, at that time. Now it’s the exact opposite. At least in regards to Fedora, it’s a very well thought out and maintained distro if you want things to just work, and Ubuntu makes me uncomfortable.

Don’t worry, you can essentially get the same shit CPU in the US by buying a Pixel.

I’ll go ahead and pre-dial 911.

It doesn’t for me? I run it on Graphene without google play services. You just have to turn off battery optimization, but it’s very reasonable in its battery usage. I’ve been off battery for 18 hours, and am at 81% on my Pixel 8. Signal is at less than 1% of battery use, and it still will be in a few days when I’m ready to charge, unless I use it significantly on my phone. But I mostly use it from my laptop, and just get notifications on my phone, so probably not.

In contrast, K9 Mail is at around 3%, it’s running at battery optimized, and I haven’t opened it at all.

We don’t even have it on desktop, yet. I wouldn’t use them as much as I do at work, where I use them to actively manage dynamic workflows. But it sure would be nice to be able to collapse some shopping tabs I typically have open, into one pinned tab group, or researching various projects.

Once they do it, I sure hope they put some more thought into how pinned tab groups should behave. They should either be to the left of all pinned tabs, or between pinned tabs and unpinned tabs. It drives me crazy in Edge, how new tabs tend to open to the left of my pinned tab groups.

Actually, I exclusively use Firefox Focus on my phone, so I don’t really care there. But I do wish they’d get out of this half-assed support for tabs, there. Just let me create new tabs without long pressing links. Maybe put a limit on number of tabs to 3 or 5. I’d also love to have a “send to desktop” option, without having to go to regular Firefox and tab sync.

A lack of government regulation would not be good for them, because it would empower their competition, and that’s the last thing they want.

This is how they do it when there is some regulation, they abuse the regulation. But without regulation, they would be free to destroy the competition with unlimited anti-competitive practices.

To me, the big problem with libertarianism is that it requires a big level of maturity from the population. It requires private regulatory and certification companies, union of workers to seek working rights in a non-violent way, and people to support charity initiatives that help the poor and endangered. All of that is not impossible, but people are very used to that being a government responsibility, it won’t happen over night

This is the problem with every philosophy, it’s an ideal that someone dreamed up. Over the last 100 years or so, we’ve lost a lot of self-sufficiency as individuals and communities, but also made some progress in other areas like civil rights. It’s a constantly changing landscape, with stronger and weaker among us, and different people trying to help or take advantage. So I agree, nothing can happen overnight, and no single social or political philosophy can be directly implemented, successfully. These philosophies should be seen as altruistic goals, with a series of challenges that society faces along the path.

Those challenges are why I’m concerned with our vilification of past failures. We can learn from those failures, and borrow the good ideas, to address challenges going forward. Knowledge of the past allows us to adapt to the future, and create a system that truly suits what we become.

But if we don’t start caring for our neighbors, as well as those across the globe, we’re lost. My morning cup of coffee, or pack of cheap t-shirts, should not lead to someone living in poverty. Likewise, my purchasing it should not enrich some individual too far above others.

Yeah, and to be fair, I have no problem with folks being what makes them happy. But the, uhh… enthusiasm makes it hard to avoid.

Oh thank god, I’m so sick of blocking furry communities. Damned things multiply like rabbits.

Then people are wrong, and we should correct them. Left wing libertarians stand in direct opposition to capitalism, and have more in common with true right wing libertarians than the extremist capitalists who are taking over the mind space of the philosophy.

This is the far right libertarianism, which has essentially become an extremist, authoritarian form of capitalism. In essence, those with immense power tell us that nobody has any right to oversight and regulation over others. Their power becomes insurmountable, and their control over the economy becomes absolute. We live according to the standards they provide, because we have no alternative.

Every system of government becomes corrupted like this when thieves and liars take control. This is not libertarianism, it is simply the flavor of authoritarianism this go 'round.

Real liberterianism comes in many forms, along the left to right spectrum. On the left, there is a belief in redistribution of natural resources to the community. Personally, I believe we should be embracing local cooperatives for food, energy, medical care, and beyond. On the right, there is more allowance for imbalance by embracing business to drive innovation. Those who innovate succeed, and accrue wealth. But a true libertarian should support a near 100% estate tax, which would limit the imbalance, because you should have what you’ve earned for yourself.

The thing that we lost that leads libertarianism to fail, is our sense of community, a sense of humanity. A responsibility when you see your neighbors suffering, to help them. Once the rich went off to live in their ivory towers, they lost sight of the rest of us.

I don’t see how any system could succeed, considering the circumstances.

[Edit] And honestly, we need to stop vilifying entire philosophies because they were previously corrupted. Just because communism was implemented in a manner that oppressed millions, doesn’t mean there is no good to the philosophies behind it and socialism.

We should be borrowing the good from everything, and remembering the bad. A blanket condemnation of failed experiments makes both impossible. No singular philosophy will be effective in this imperfect world, only in theory is that level of refinement possible.

I agree. I have privacy concerns, but ultimately, I think I care more about freedom and open source. I have very real concerns about the rise of authoritarianism in America, and I’m trying to balance that against a preference for more open services like mailbox.org and fastmail.

Ease and difficulty of installation are strengths and weaknesses, don’t sell yourself short.

I had a lot of problems back when I lived in civilization. But now that I live out of range of cell signals, and can’t even see neighbors’ wifi networks, it works a whole hell of a lot better. I still use a traditional DECT (Logitech H820e), and also a dongled 2.4ghz (Audeze Maxwell) headsets for work, but I also use the Maxwell with my phone over bluetooth without a problem. My Sennheiser Momentum 4 work fine with both my phone running Graphene, and my Thinkpad running Fedora.

I won’t even try with Windows. The bluetooth stack is such trash.

Nightmares are dreams.