That was where I started before I went distro hopping on my test machine. Ubuntu had a really annoying issue where the fingerprint reader would randomly stop working waking up from sleep. Going into sleep sometimes just didn’t work, and battery life was also pretty awful.

Does the job well is my priority, not runs Linux.

I’m also not going to buy inferior hardware just to run a specific OS. Plus in a laptop you don’t really get a choice. Almost 0 workstations have AMD GPUs.

On older hardware I almost never have issues, it’s only really on the latest hardware that I run into all sorts of issues.

But even then I still run into issues decently often on older hardware. ex: On my T14 gen 1 (came out in 2020 so should be well supported) I was distro hopping and kept running into all sorts of things that annoyed me. The fingerprint reader was hit or miss which really surprised me. Some distros it didn’t show up at all, others it technically worked, but was so inaccurate it was infuriating to use, and often times would randomly stop working. S0 standby is still really fiddly and inconsistent. It sucks ass on windows, but it was even worse with almost any distro I tried. Trackpads are also still borderline unusable on linux. I know it will never come close to Mac OS which has spoiled me, but dear god does it bring back some mid 2000s PTSD. Also battery life was much worse which surprised me for a machine of that age, I figured power management would have been perfected by now.

But that was my beater machine, I don’t even bother installing it on my main machines. Mostly because of the nvidia GPUs. I have yet to try it on my old RTX 3080 laptop, but I might give it a shot since it’s currently unloved. But my biggest concerns are with S0 standby (curse you Intel), and battery life. I have never gotten good battery life on bleeding edge hardware, and from all the reading I’ve been doing lately it looks like the battery life gap has only gotten worse on brand new hardware. I know newer ryzen battery life has been pretty rough, but it’s making some good strides. The problem is that by the time the support is fully baked I’m eyeing another upgrade.

Virtual machines or servers? Hell yeah I use Linux all day long. On my computer? No thanks. I’ll still to my weird windows + mac setup.

But what if in installing Linux you have to spend even more time fixing it and getting everything to work right?

I never had any issues. The biggest thing is to have a strict sleep schedule, and have black out blinds. If you’re loosey goosey it’s going to be suffering.

I got into CloudWorkers with the hopes it is some sort of legit cause I am in deep crap.

https://www.reddit.com/r/freelance/comments/kfx8bt/warning_about_cloudworkers/

I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Also low level, $20 an hour, remote really is asking for a LOT. Can you not work in person, or do you just don’t want to work in person? $20 an hour is reasonable in person, $20 an hour remote isn’t.

Words will do nothing, that’s how Trump was elected.

Actions are what’s needed. Get out there.

If you’ve got a thunderbolt port on your laptop and a thunderbolt dock on your laptop then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.

I’m not familiar with thunderbolt on linux, but on windows you plug it in and it just works™️ and shows up as if it was inside your machine. Your DE on linux might automatically do it, but if you’re command line only you’ll probably have to run a command first.

Social media in general was also a lot smaller back then too.

Until the iPhone got popular you had to use a computer to access it. And back then we didn’t really trust sleep mode very much so you had to wait 2 minutes for windows to boot when you wanted to go on the net. VS right now I’m standing in from of my clothes not getting ready for work for 45 seconds.

That’s how most things are in tech. Why reinvent the wheel when someone’s already made it?

I personally love trying to break into any device running android and install our companies web crawler onto it. I almost got it working on my DJI drone remote. Sadly I don’t think I’ll be able to get into these Logitech Tap Scheduler things.

If you blindly trust it then yeah it will cause problems. But if you know what you’re doing, but forget X or Y minor thing here and there, or just need some direction it’s amazing.

Also in the event of a crash you don’t become a projectile that kills someone else.

ChatGPT is incredibly good at helping you with random programming questions, or just dumping a full ass error text and it telling you exactly what’s wrong.

This afternoon I used ChatGPT to figure out what the error preventing me from updating my ESXi server. I just copy pasted the entire error text which was one entire terminal windows worth of shit, and it knew that there was an issue accessing the zip. It wasn’t smart enough to figure out “hey dumbass give it a full file path not relative” but eventually I got there. Earlier this morning I used it to write a cross apply instead of using multiple sub select statements. It forgot to update the order by, but that was a simple fix. I use it for all sorts of other things we do at work too. ChatGPT won’t replace any programmers, but it will help them be more productive.

The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.

Decentrilization is both a blessing and a curse.

If there’s an issue you can make your own community with blackjack, and hookers.

But at the same time these communities never seem to get super big (minus a few) and if you’re subscribed to both there’s not a good way to deduplicate the posts. So 5 communities post the same thing (or one person posts them in 5) sometimes you see all 5 side by side.

Don’t forget safety. There’s a LOT of of sketchy ass gan (and non gan) chargers I wouldn’t even let in my house. Gan chargers being by so compact dont have enough space to safely insulate things.

Not even an exaggeration, I feel physically ill just thinking about it.

99% of the time water in my water bottle and nothing else.

The 1% of the time it’s not its water nearby + coffee or a soda.

The concept of having more than 1 drink other than water is bewildering, and honestly disgusting to me.

Modern phone cameras are 99% software at this point. If you took one phones camera and put it onto another phone without adapting the software then the photos will look like ass.

You can’t just unplug something from device X and connect it to device Y. The connectors aren’t standardized. And even if they were they wouldn’t fit because the placement is different. In theory you could take the CPU off of one device and plant it onto another. But have fun with that BGA micro soldering. Plus the connections will be different unless you picked a phone with the exact same CPU. Ram is the only thing you could potentially upgrade. But like good luck.

You’d legitimately have an easier time making a new phone from scratch than trying to piece together 3 different phones.

If you need the money then start looking for jobs now, and quit when you’ve got something.