I had a friend who wanted to try linux but insisted on arch because it’s what I used at the time even though I said they shouldn’t and gave many suggestions for better distros. They gave up after about a day and went back to windows. I don’t know what they expected, multiple people warned them not to use arch.
I’m switching from manjaro to endeavour atm, and i am liking endeavour a lot. I kept having issues with manjaro boot after every kernel update, but otherwise didnt mind it. Probably whatever manjaros build chain for boot is just wasn’t working with my hardware, but also the attitude on the forum is that you are stupid if you have to roll the kernel back.
Endeavour really just provides you arch with some maintenance utilities and otherwise lets you do your thing.
No more firefox home page getting constantly reset to the manajro home page so they can market you their laptop partnerships either 😉
I’ve been off windows for a long time, and when I was forced to use it, it was enterprise, locked down and stripped by knowledgeable IT teams.
Yesterday, I had my first exposure to Win 11 S mode. What a piece of crap. Not just the way its locked down, but the incessant Onedrive ads, broken settings app with missing features, AI buzzword addons, sloppy UI and general lack of control over your own computer.
Recommending my friend install Linux ASAP with my support. Nobody should have to endure that much cruft and garbage on their owned computer. They can’t even install software outside of the MS store? Gross.
Oh yeah no I was not at all saying windows was better, I was just saying arch was definitely not a good distribution for beginners and it was weird how one just insisted on using it. I use arch on my laptop and opensuse tumbleweed on my desktop and have not used windows for anything serious in years because it is so unbearable.
I understood you weren’t advocating for Windows (as an Arch user? The very idea!), but your mention of your friend returning to Windows got me thinking about my friends laptop and how icky it felt.
Glad there are fewer and fewer barriers to using Linux full time these days.
I love Arch but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. In my eyes, the only way one should choose Arch is despite all warnings against it, because they feel confident enough to deal with all the problems they encounter.
Honestly I’ve had so little trouble with arch compared to other things, so I would definitely recommend it to experienced linux users, just definitely not unexperienced users. The aur is amazing and rolling release means you don’t have to deal with the horrors of major updates breaking packages. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is also a great candidate though for people who don’t want to set as many things up themself, I’m currently using both arch and tumbleweed on different computers
Yup! Same here. Once I’ve got everything set up, it has been running smoothly and without any issues for more than 5 years in my case. It’s literally the most reliable system I’ve ever set up, but I understand that the entry hurdle is pretty high.
My IT Bros said the same back when I had to choose W10 or Linux, they haven’t used arch and I had 0 Linux experience. I messed up every single step of the installation to a point where I knew from the problems I created what I did wrong. After many tries and a week later I had a working installation with dual boot. Never used windows and removed it a year later. It was rough but I learned how to recover from most errors a user can create.
If learning is the goal arch and arch-wiki is great.
Ok look I’m not a huge Arch fan either (it’s great for learning the ins and outs of Linux but I’ve gotten to the point that stability is more important than anything to me) but the wiki is the most thorough Linux documentation you can get anywhere. It always, always has the answer, even if you don’t use Arch, lol.
The repairability is still good, you can get parts and there’s a manual published by Lenovo that will guide you on everything. But upgradability just isn’t there anymore. I guess in some of the high end P series like P1, but most have soldered RAM now. The AMD models even have soldered wifi cards. I like my P14s g4 AMD, and also my T14s g3 AMD from work, but I’m really looking forward to the progression of Framework, and also System76’s in-house design.
AMD currently tends towards running significantly cooler and quieter, and the graphics in the APU are far better.
Edit: I agree to avoid the E and L series, L is better than E if you absolutely must. But I wouldn’t. I’d also avoid the X1, they sacrifice way too much to be thin. The T series is really the sweet spot. T14s is tuned to run cool and quiet, and is only about 1mm thinner than the T14. The T14 is middle ground, and boosts a little more but sacrifices a bit of noise. I really can’t tell the build quality between the T14s and T14 in this latest design, the T14s used to use significantly better materials. The P14s is simply a T14 that supports more RAM and boosts even further.
The T16 and P16s are the same relationship at the 14 incher, but with a bigger battery and an offset keyboard with a numpad.
The X13 is the same motherboard as the T14s, but in a 13" design. The T14s and X13 also get dual USB4 on the AMD models, while the T14/P14s only get one. I think that carries over to Intel models with Thunderbolt, but I’m not sure.
The Z series is odd. Better touchpads, sleeker design, AMD only. The Z16 doesn’t have an offset keyboard. The Z16 is also the only option for discrete graphics from AMD. But… they’re not really Thinkpads, in a traditional sense. The materials aren’t as robust, and they sacrifice cooling some for thinness. I’d consider one a lot more than the X1 series, and I’m excited for the redesign in a few years.
The P series is really diverse, from the P14s and P16s that are really just rebadges the T series, to the P1 that is a serious workhorse. There’s quite a bit inbetween, but aside from the entry models, they’re going to be quite a lot less portable, more power hungry, be louder, and have worse battery. If they’re what you need, great, if not, eh.
I chose the P14s gen 4 AMD with 64GB of RAM. I’ll run some VMs at times, and the RAM will also help future proof me since I can’t upgrade down the road. I was back and forth between it and the T14s, but when I got my T14s at work I realized that this gen just isn’t any more premium than the T14/P14s. I popped in a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro, which is the only single sided 4TB drive with RAM that I know of.
Originally I ordered an OLED model, but the battery life was horrible. The 400 nit low power LCD is probably what you want. The 500 nit privacy guard has horrible viewing angles by design, and the 300 nit LCD is below average in color reproduction and uniformity. The T14s has a 300 nit low power with slightly higher resolution, I probably would have gotten that if the P14s offered it. I might swap later.
As a hyprland user, gnome is great and I would recommend it to pretty much anyone
Hyprland is great if you consider your machine a toy as well as a tool and enjoy spending hours customising and theming
I would choose my hyprland setup over gnome 9 times out of 10, but I’d choose gnome over someone else’s setup every time because they actually know what they’re doing and make a great one size fits all DE (my hyprland config takes very heavy inspiration from GNOME with a few changes to suit my personal preference)
Yes it work with English content very well. You can rerout all your audio to it via helvum. The big problem is that it only has 3 languages supported English, French and Polish. So it technicality works but not in German unfortunately. But I can say now it partly works on Linux.
DVI should not control the monitor’s actual physical controls - it does include a small non-display channel but IIRC that’s used to get the display modes info from the monitor, and potentially to transmit contrast information and the like; some monitors will prevent you from adjusting contrast if DVI sends that info for example, but it certainly shouldn’t disable the power button.
My guess would be a hardware issue - in the monitor itself - which is somehow triggered by the sequence in which you do enable the displays, and your system update being unrelated. It’s a huge guess though. One thing to try is repeating both sequences (the one that locks your buttons and the one that doesn’t) using a live CD - not a “nobara 38” one if such a thing exists, another distro. Trying both monitors on another computer would be an interesting test as well, although not necessarily that helpful (because if it doesn’t occur there, it might just mean the issue is triggered by peculiarities in your graphic card).
So I decided to bite the bullet and did a fresh install of Fedora 39 and that appeared to have made the issue go away. In the process of installing updates and configuring it the way I like, the monitor control buttons on both monitors response. So, it seems like the cause of the issue could have been a glitch during an update. Who knows? At least I know that it’s not a hardware issue (cross finders). :)
Unlikely, but who knows? Can you try and boot Windows (install iso probably enough)? Or some very old Linux distro? It might just be your monitor becoming weird with age.
Edit: Alsobtry with a laptop or something and see how it goes.
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