I never needed to use command line, but I did hone my typing skills on MIRC and ICQ.

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

The only way to make sure Linux works like that is to have a closed hardware environment. But it has to play nicely with other hardware and services (e.g. printers, webcams, etc + office documents, etc). It has taken a very long time for MacOS to get to this point, but people put up with Mac compromises because enough things worked smoothly.

I’ve just commented about this in another thread…but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.

A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out.

I installed VMware Horizon for my job’s remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn’t bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.

I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies.

I still can’t get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.

I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.

Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute.

Plasma recently added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can’t figure out why.

I can’t get CopyQ to launch minimised no matter what I do.

My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can’t figure out why they’ve decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still.

Flatpak Steam app wouldn’t pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.

My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn’t supported.

People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn’t include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS’s when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows.

I love Linux. I’m so glad I switched both my PC and laptop to OpenSUSE and got rid of dual boot Windows. Using Linux exclusively for months has really opened my eyes to the truth:

My NewPipe app stopped working for a week and it wasn’t difficult at all living without YouTube. There’s tons of content in the world that can be consumed in its place.

Thanks. Really helps to know where to start looking when I get time over the weekend.

My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.

This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.

Sorry for the loss OP.

Maybe not what you want to hear right now, but I’m really glad Steam cloud minimises the impact of a loss. When I had a Nintendo Switch I was terrified of losing hundreds of hours of Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon progress. Losing a Deck is obviously a financial loss (and the emotional attachment of someone special giving you yours), but at least there isn’t insult to add to the injury the way Nintendo would do.

That is beyond the capabilities of normies.

My wife would agree with this:

And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.

You’ve basically described my situation exactly. I built a PC 6 months ago for Linux. I distro-hopped for a good while and settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Now I’ve put OpenSUSE on my laptop too. I would highly recommend it.

I went for an AMD GPU and have never had any problems with it. Linux is not as painless as Lemmy would have you believe though. Be prepared to learn some hard lessons and keep your data physically disconnected from the PC while you do it.

You’ve asked about WiFi drivers further down…on my PC, the only distros that had the correct WiFi drivers out of the box were EndeavourOS and ZorinOS. The rest all needed wired LAN to get them going.

I know it has the ability to, but I don’t recommend it. I’ve recently commented on this so I’ll paste it here:

DO NOT dual boot as a beginner. I did this when I started and would screw up something with the bootloader and be unable to boot one of the OSs (data can still be copied off, but installed app data isn’t easily recovered). Being a noob at the time, I even accidentally wiped the wrong drive during a distro hop.

For a beginner I would recommend you remove your Windows SSD and keep it safe in a drawer. Or clone the drive first. Then you can mess around all you want while keeping your original SSD safe.if the data and OS/app installs are valuable then don’t fuck around learning a new system with the drive in situ. Certainly don’t try to learn to partition and dual boot off the same drive. The noob risk is just too high.

https://lemm.ee/comment/13744698

In order to use dual boot, one must be able to set up dual boot. This guide is addressed towards people who have never used Linux.

If you’re lucky enough to have more than one device, then I’d just say use Linux on your secondary device. I used my Steam Deck as my PC for a month before I made the change.

Isn’t that the problem? We haven’t known where to draw the line, and so a lot of unregulated and uninhibited activity is taking place in this way. This is a very strong route to push disguised advertising and propaganda.

I fully support people playing around and possibly soft-breaking their things just for the heck of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQX4FLrm9ac

DO NOT dual boot as a beginner. I did this when I started and would screw up something with the bootloader and be unable to boot one of the OSs (data can still be copied off, but installed app data isn’t easily recovered). Being a noob at the time, I even accidentally wiped the wrong drive during a distro hop.

For a beginner I would recommend you remove your Windows SSD and keep it safe in a drawer. Or clone the drive first. Then you can mess around all you want while keeping your original SSD safe.if the data and OS/app installs are valuable then don’t fuck around learning a new system with the drive in situ. Certainly don’t try to learn to partition and dual boot off the same drive. The noob risk is just too high.

I used eBay so I could get a refund if the laptop wasn’t as advertised. I spent weeks looking at new listings looking for a good deal. I eventually found an amazing deal from a hospice that was selling excess stock. I’ve worked in a hospice before and know this would have only ever been used sparingly in an office and be very well looked after.

On eBay I would avoid anyone who hasn’t written out a complete description and detailed pictures of condition and specifics. Like the other comment says, the BIOS being unlocked is very important. Read descriptions carefully. People fall victim to buying expensive things that can’t be returned because it was mentioned in the listing (e.g. buying a box only for a very expensive price). For any laptop I find, I search for forum posts from other users about how that model works with Linux and videos for a teardown to make sure that RAM, WiFi module, etc can be upgraded. Make sure the charger is included.

Search eBay for “8th Gen 13 inch 16GB”, then sort by lowest price for buy-it-now. That’s what I did for a number of weeks. Got one for myself and a great one for my dad as well. Good experience both times.

I’ve just been through the process you’ve described and bought a laptop. Your budget is way overkill for your use (documents, browsing, video watching).

I recently bought myself a “like new” second hand Dell Latitude (5300, I think), 8th gen i7, 16GB Ram for £150 and it is amazing with OpenSUSE.

I got my wife a new HP Aero 13 (Ryzen) a couple of years ago and even that was £580 brand new and has been great.

Consider the secondhand market. A lot of laptops will meet your criteria.

Synology NAS, Wifi 6 router and Plex have been a fantastic life upgrade for me.