My HL2030 is incredibly easy to use from Linux

Because it’s a disproportionate amount of effort to natively support an extra OS (particularly one as fragmented as Linux), especially one with such a small userbase that largely isn’t interested in using proprietary cloud services in the first place because of data privacy and security concerns.

Obviously not all Linux users are super worried about that stuff (I mean, I use Linux and have a google pixel), but on average the Linux userbase is way way more aware of that stuff than most users who just want their photos backed up without having to worry about it.

Yep, this is it. I volunteered for my school’s IT department in high school, this was basically the logic. The laptops are cheap and easy to manage/administrate. Whether or not they were Linux was a non-issue.

Edit: also, since chromeOS is basically just a browser, there wasn’t much that could break, and if something did break everything was stored in google drive anyway, so you could just factory reset the device and hand it back to the student without needing to buy any kind of higher-level support contract.

the internet in general kind of sucks these days. Reddit has burned down a lot of the things that made its search results so useful in the past. Every forum post more than a few years old is a forest of broken links; the top of basically any internet search whatsoever is an ocean of SEO spam. And that’s before you get into the sheer amount of information that isn’t searcheable at all because it’s on platforms like discord.

I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.

I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.

SSDs are very cheap these days

The motherboard itself is also open-source: https://github.com/system76/virgo/

The x220 is quite easily the best laptop ever made imo, and I’ll never understand why they just don’t slap modern hardware into it and re-release it.

I use manjaro, but it isn’t what I would call stable.

I would use one of the tools listed in the archwiki; I have an intel chip so I’ve never used any myself.

Once you find a tool that can undervolt, usually the recommendation is to lower the voltage incrementally until you see unstable behavior and crashes, than raise it back to the last good voltage, then run a stress-test to verify.

just the readme for throttled

I kind of wish I had played with ROMs and stuff earlier. I still like the idea, but I don’t use it because I use mobile payments so much that it would be a PITA not to have that working.

specifically battery life for my University classes

try undervolting your CPU/GPU. That was the first thing I did when I got my thinkpad and it improved the thermals and battery life significantly.

Not true breakage usually, but eventually I got tired of having new surprise bugs in shit that was working fine before.

yep, considering switching to nixos for this reason.

I’ve been very happy with Pocket Casts. Their subscription is pretty cheap (not one-time though, unfortunately), and it has automatic sync between the android and desktop apps.

you can do this on debian, too. It’s not specific to the OS – it’s the window manager. Specifically, this kind of window manager is called a tiling window manager.

Basically it just organizes your windows slightly differently. Instead of having them floating around like in Windows, Mac, or traditional desktop environments like GNOME, it tiles them – when you open a new window, it automatically split screens it.

window managers also don’t by default have things like a battery display or a wi-fi applet, like your typical desktop environment does – you have to do that stuff manually by building some sort of status bar (there are various apps that provide status bars).

I didn’t get it either, but this video does a pretty good job explaining why it’s different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMQWirkx5EY

honestly, part of the reason I made a lemmy account at all is because it feels a little like reddit when I first started using it – pretty niche, and less toxic and low-quality because of it.

reddit in the last few years has become very toxic. The smaller communities are still okay, but on all of the main subs it’s just page after page of the same snarky jokes and tired memes.

so while more growth would be nice, I’m fine if most of reddit stays on reddit in the short-term. the fediverse can be its own thing.

2023, year of the linux desktop?

if nothing else, you could make a pretty fun digital treasure hunt or geocaching thing with it