I’m much happier to install one of the dozens of adblock addons, than to disable the built in one and still install an addon. Cuz that would mean bloat. I want to have the options to choose the adblock I have installed, and not only which one I use.
Builtin adblockers of other browsers, especially more commercial ones, have proven to be buyable by ad companies. They also fail, and have failed, on YouTube, where some addons still succeed.
One could argue Mozilla could encourage the users to actively choose an adblocker, but that would mean annoying popups and basically ads for adblockers.
Default FF with a few settings and addons is fine.
Give nobara a try. It’s fedora with focus on gaming. Mint is always a good option. Personally I use endeavour os, pretty straight forward to install but maybe a bit too barebones if you don’t know what you need yet.
I’d used 2 HDs, 1TB each, Western Digital Black ones, in raid0 back in time; it really helps when it comes to loading times. But, if you can afford, try raid0 with SSDs nowadays; the performance will be way better!
Just try to have a small /boot partition outside of the raid block!
Old thinkpads are the golden standard of Linux compatible laptops, far superior build quality compared to the crap they put out today. Cheap and durable, if a little outdated in specs. TLP is a popular battery management tool that have specific built integration with thinkpads. I managed to snag a couple thinkpads through FB marketplace pre covid for under 200$ each, my daily driver being a t460 made in 2015. i7 quad core processor, 16gb ram, its weakest link is the Intel onboard GPU. The newer thinkpads let you use thunderbolt 3.0 to plug in an external GPU but there’s a trade off between how new a thinkpad is and its build quality. The old ones could be used as body armor plates and probably stop a 50 cal bullet and boot up fine afterwards, the new ones not much
so what i’ve been doing is finding various models through the generations and researching their cpu’s and oddly enough, nearly every one i’ve put in has had subpar ratings or rankings… idk if that really matters or not
It depends on what you expect your laptop to do. 8gb ram and a 2.4ghz i5 quad core processor is acceptable for almost any computing task out side of playing heavier load video games or specialty IT stuff like LLMs or cryptomining. If your main concern is video games go with the base model steam deck. Also, when you go check out listing for used think pads you will find they contain wildly different specs even if they are the same series. This is because the companies that bought them new X years ago spend some sweet corporate cash on decking them out with the at-the-time highest end options ordered custom from lenovo, and then they throw them in the literal trash a decade later. Some people who dig them out and resell on facebook don’t know a thing about computers and think they are only worth the base options used price.
Glad to have helped you out. Whatever you decide to get, I highly recommend you give Linux Mint a try next. I started with ubuntu, went to mint and haven’t looked back since. Its been my daily driver for half a decade now and has worked absolutely perfectly with every laptop and desktop ive ever owned. My elderly parents use mint without issue every day.
A quick cheat sheet for understanding computer spec lingo:
Ram:
4gb = bare minimum
8gb = pretty good
16gb = awesome
Intel CPU cores:
duo/two cores = bare minimum
quad core/four cores = pretty good, most common
more = awesome
Intel CPU processor
i3 = bare minimum
i5 = pretty good
i7 = awesome
Intel CPU processing speed measured in gigahertz ghz
2.x ghz = average
3.x ghz = awesome
hard drive
HDD = Slower and more limited lifespan but ok, tends to be higher storage space than SSD for cheaper
SSD = Faster and much longer lifespan, usually only goes up to 256GB but its possible to find 512GB. More expensive than HHDs
Harddrive Storage Space
100GB = bare minimum
256GB = average
512GB = pretty good
1TB = Awesome
Upgrading
You can have a computer shop upgrade harddrives to a multi terabyte SSD as well as replace the batteries for you if you do your research and provide it for them.
Another big win for thinkpads is theres lots of documentation on upgrading, and you can order official parts right from lenovo vendors through their website Which is huge for replacing batteries when they degrade to the point of annoyance. Thinkpads have an external battery and an internal one both you can replace to get supposedly about 10 hours of battery life. I get like 3 at this point so I may be considering this option soon. The Linux command TLP can help you get a good estimate on how degraded your batteries are.
Its quick and easy to install a flatpak which is the latest stable which is a godsend when the versions available through package manager are years out of date. Not everyone can compile from source or add an additional source repo. My only big issue is how bloated flatpaks are size wise and where stuff gets installed in my file system.
I guess the closest to a decent FOSS piano plugin is MDA Piano, or perhaps search for piano samples. Perhaps someone has created a decent piano preset for the dexed FM synth (but will probably sound very 80s). I’m using pianoteq (unfortunately proprietary, but it has native linux support and sounds good).
I’ve never dived into this, but if electronic keyboards are just glorified midi-controllers, I’d have to think you could find a FOSS solution. If they’re not simply midi-controllers, I wouldn’t begin to know. I’d imagine you might have an easier time with keyboards from the 90s or whenever.
I like Kinoite, have been happy for a year or so (how time flies). Pretty bulletproof, automatic updates and rollbacks, lotsa good stuff. One minor but relevant gotcha is it doesn’t like docker particularly much, I found the path of least resistance was to move to podman (which is more secure, can be easily turned into (–user) system.d units and has a cool auto update feature), podman-compose is your friend…
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