And of course I’m installing Linux on it. Install went well, even the fingerprint sensor built in to the laptop works.
Mostly this will be a school and DND machine but always nice to have a functional laptop for whatever else I may need it for.
And of course I’m installing Linux on it. Install went well, even the fingerprint sensor built in to the laptop works.
Mostly this will be a school and DND machine but always nice to have a functional laptop for whatever else I may need it for.
Thinkpads are awesome. They aren’t as good as they used to be, but they still work great for linux.
Why mint?
I use mint as my “TV room” OS. It’s worked pretty well so far.
Mostly for compatibility and ease of use. I don’t wanna fiddle with things if I don’t have to. Wanted it to be stable. Ive also been thinking about switching to mint on my main machine so this is also kind of a test run. I tried mint years ago but it didn’t work well for me back then.
Can you give an example of a Linux distro that isn’t stable, that you have to “fiddle” with?
Stop it.
Arch
my brother uses arch…by the way.
he tells me to install it. I say “fuck no, thank you”
You should try it, to get a taste of what is possible, then learn what to do, and maybe even stay. But it’s not for beginners, the terminal-phobic, or people that rarely use their PC.
It won’t bite you. I’ve been using it professionally and privately for over a decade without issues. If it sounds interesting to you, try it out. It’s very mature. 👍
I’ve ranted at length many times on Lemmy about how Arch is very stable and doesn’t need fiddling. You can check my comment history, I’m not feeling like repeating myself right now. 💀 Arch not being “stable” is a myth.
It doesn’t need fiddling, but it invites you to do so. And the default setup is hardly a best practice: swap on a partition, no FDE, no zram… missing FDE in particular will require you to reinstall, and you better have found out how to do proper backups including metadata.
There seems to be a misunderstanding in the definition of “stable” for distros. Arch is solid, it’ll rarely break, when it breaks it’ll be mostly due to the users own interest in fiddling with the system in the first place. But Arch follows the rolling-release model, with incremental updates which may require manual intervention — again, happens on very rare occasions — it differs from the stable release model, where distros like Debian have small changes, more guided towards security rather than having the newest software.
So by definition I wouldn’t say Arch is stable, even if it’s not the common usage, it’s best to describe that it requires system management and maintenance, but it’s not brittle, unlike Windows.
This is also a myth, on both counts. This is assuming you always install every single update to all packages as soon as it’s released, and have to do so just because there’s a new version. That’s not how Arch operates. You are in charge of initiating an upgrade. It’s a manual command that you run, right.
If you upgrade often, you’re more likely to run into buggy releases. Just upgrade less often and reduce your likelihood of installing buggy latest releases. Just like Debian and other such distros do. You’re in charge on Arch.
This is only one way of mitigating risk that you can do, but I do concede that Arch does not take every precaution that other distros do to ensure that broken packages are not released. They do however follow up with news posts if there’s an issue, with info about what to do. This is an awesome thing.
But still, I haven’t had an issue in over a decade, upgrading packages probably once a week or so.
There’s no “maintenance” other than what you create for yourself. This Arch = “maintenance” (whatever that entails in everyone’s mind) nonsense has got to be put to bed.
While it’s true you can do that, then why choose Arch in the first place? One of the key elements in the philosophy for Arch is: Modernity, i.e. to always have the latest version to be the stable version, aka the rolling release model. You can choose not to upgrade, but it can be a immense footgun. There’s a reason it’s harder to upgrade between release versions in distros like Debian.
Besides being a stable release doesn’t guarantee no bugs either, only that they don’t change. Meaning as long as the bugs are minor or can be bypassed, it’s still considered stable.
No doubt, but you do have to keep track of this. People non familiar with it may find their systems temporarily borked if they don’t. One good mention for those of interest is their incredible documentation, it can also be used as a reference for other distros too.
In over a decade using Arch, I have encountered bugs or changes when upgrading packages, following a similar upgrade cadence. I also used packages that have been deprecated from the official repository, and then maintaned by users in the AUR. These are things that break the users experience and require maintenance. Regardless if it’s a bug or not, or if it happens once or twice a year, the user has to pay close attention.
this is total bullshit. you need to update for security reasons. and every time you update, you get the latest version with allpossible incompatibilities. even if you are updating only a few times per month, you don’t update to a “known working state”, you update to the latest package version with all problems that might come with it.
also long times between updates can cause various other problems.
If you update once or twice a week, chances are there are literally hundreds of packages to upgrade every time. There’s no chance someone will look into every single one of these packages to verify what could potentially ‘break’ their system or not. They just upgrade the whole thing and THEN, if something breaks, they work around it.
As someone who uses CachyOS daily as my main distro, I wouldn’t install it on a device for someone that doesn’t want to do some maintenance from time to time. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far to say that it is UNSTABLE, but point release distros such as Mint or Debian are definitely more stable and require much less maintenance. Rolling release distros are, naturally, much riskier.
TempleOS?
Not Linux, and of course the perfect OS.