As a genera rule avoid Nvidia. Also google the fingerprint sensor and wifi model before buying. General advice like “Thinkpads are fully linux compatible” is rubbish. Take your time to Google all idiosyncrasies of your desired model.
Im just most concerned about it being linux user friendly and fairly durable, as I tend to mess things up and wipe my drive sorts often lol hey, i’m learning! don’t game so don’t need Nvidia, check. don’t need a fingerprint sensor, check. so what is it that actually makes linux more compatible with some computers but not others? does it boil down to the cpu???
Focus on what you’re going to use the laptop for and choose your hardware accordinly. Linux will work great as long as your hardware is not unsupported. So don’t worry about that at all.
Indian here. There are a lot of Indians that love tech experimentation and “jugaad”, and just the mere act of dailying Linux allows us to step up our IT industry game for zero cost.
So this is my setup, and it’s pretty cost effective. I have two 2Tb HDDs that are striped and one 500Gb SSD that’s alone. The games I play the most live on my SSD, any games I’m not really playing live on the HDD. Then I just move my games from one to another. I didn’t even have the second HDD for the longest time. I don’t bother with using the SSD as a cache anymore. There is no advantage in gameplay to striping a game, however updates and moves are faster.
Mint is always my recommendation for a Linux beginner. It’s the most “it just works” distro I’ve ever messed with, and has plenty of documentation for anything you’d need.
As for advice: I know you want to avoid the CLI, but try to poke around in there and learn it some. Once you get used to it, you can accomplish a lot of things even faster than through GUI applications.
I do. Gnome is a special case because it doesn’t give you a lot of options. It’s take it or leave it, and it doesn’t follow the traditional mouse-centric desktop workflow.
But in my opinion it’s absolutely perfect for a laptop where you use the keyboard and touchpad. With a few key combos and swipe gestures you can fly through the UI and it only ever shows you what’s relevant at the moment.
I use both GNOME and KDE. I do have a system tray, but it’s for a single program: fcitx-mozc. If I didn’t need to build ibus-mozc from source, I would just use that. iBus IMEs get their own spot in the top right without needing appindicators. That being said, I don’t need the system tray either as I can just switch between Japanese and English with CTRL+SPACE. But it’s nice to have some kind of constant indication what IME I’m using.
On the subject of a dock, though, I love the way GNOME completely separates it from the workspace. It just takes up space and I don’t have any utility for it. Windows and macOS only allow you to hide the dock; not remove it completely. I’ve accidentally opened the dock by moving my cursor to the corner of the screen way too many times and it is sooo annoying. This never happens on GNOME because it’s just not possible.
Also I tend to think it’s been designed for people who are more comfortable using a keyboard. I’m mostly a mouse person.
That’s absolutely true, but you can navigate GNOME completely with a mouse. If you’re on a laptop, you can use the trackpad to flick between workspaces with three fingers. Every aspect of the GNOME desktop is navigable with the mouse, including the Activity Overview. GNOME’s workflow changed the way I use computers.
One thing I miss from KDE is GNOME’s tiling. KDE’s is far more inconsistent. But there are a lot of things I like more about KDE too. I use it in basically the same way as GNOME.
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