About a year ago I was lucky on eBay, winning an old Acer Switch Alpha 12 for ~95€ including shipping. I think it was released about 2016.
Even if it shows a lot of signs of wear, it is still a very good device. I received it with Windows 11, but of course I didn’t want use it like that. 4 gigs of ram aren’t enough for that anyway.
So I installed Fedora. (Had to rename the uefi boot entry for it to boot from disk. This is described elsewhere online but if you read this post and wonder how to do it, please dm me and I’ll be happy to help.)
Now this is my primary device for when I’m away from my desktop PC. Gnome is stunning on 2-in-1s IMO, much better than Windows would ever be.
Hardware wise everything works just fine out of the box, apart from the rear camera which isn’t recognized, but I wouldn’t use that anyway.
Honestly, the Switch Alpha 12 is the poor man’s MS Surface and I think it’s a shame that Acer has apparently given up on this device class. For now I’m happy to use this pc for as long as I can.
It’s a rabbit hole, you have to get fairly deep into it to start reaping some “benefits”. Even if you start with something easy like cinnamon mint, there’s a small chance it might break something on major upgrade. But it’s generally fairly easy to fix if you have some grasp on the system.
The best way to learn would be to just install something like arch or debian in a VM but do everything in manual steps while trying to understand what every step’s accomplishing.
I mean, who would have thought 10 years ago that this would one day be a valid reason to switch away from the OS with the biggest marketshare. Weird times.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I’m really interested in KDE Plasma now.
I agree that KDE Plasma should satiate your desire for customizing the look and feel of your system. But, note that KDE Plasma isn’t properly supported on Linux Mint. Therefore, consider switching to a Distro in which it is; e.g. the KDE Flavors/Spins of Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu.
Get the list of programs you commonly use and figure out if they’re on Linux or have alternatives. Libreoffice, VLC and Okular are good for your case. If you find it limiting and need MS features then browser Office 365 is very good.
The best option would be to buy a used laptop and install Linux, Linux works great on old hardware so you could find something 3-7y old and it’ll run very well.
If you’re coming from Apple try anything with Gnome that’s popular (Ubuntu, Fedora).
If you’re coming from windows try anything that uses KDE (Kubuntu, Fedora w KDE, KDE neon).
If you don’t tinker with things under the hood generally you’ll have a painless polished experience.
Being able to get a modern OS that runs smoothly on a 200$ used laptop is the major selling point for you, rest is extra.
We use browser office 365 at work. It’s on a Windows computer. I gotta say it sucks ass if your stuff doesn’t all live in an associated onedrive. We have a shared drive that common files live in and accessing them from the browser office is a mess.
AppStream makes machine-readable software metadata easily accessible. It is a foundational block for modern Linux software centers, offering a seamless way to retrieve information about available software, no matter the repository it is contained in. It can provide data about available applications as well as available firmware, drivers, fonts and other components. This project it part of freedesktop.org.
before anyone gets too excited, this doesn’t seem like it applies to DG2 gaming cards, ATSM and PVC are compute cards
<span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Capability
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+=================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Due to SR-IOV complexity and required co-operation between hardware, firmware
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+and kernel drivers, not all Xe architecture platforms might have SR-IOV enabled
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or fully functional.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+To control at the driver level which platform will provide support for SR-IOV,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+as we can't just rely on the PCI configuration data exposed by the hardware,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+we will introduce "has_sriov" flag to the struct xe_device_desc that describes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+a device capabilities that driver checks during the probe.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially this flag will be set to disabled even on platforms that we plan to
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+support. We will enable this flag only once we finish merging all required
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+changes to the driver and related validated firmwares are also made available.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+SR-IOV Platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Initially we plan to add SR-IOV functionality to the following SDV platforms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+already supported by the Xe driver:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - TGL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ADL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - MTL (up to 7 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - ATSM (up to 31 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+ - PVC (up to 63 VFs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+Newer platforms will be supported later, but we hope that enabling will be
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+much faster, as majority of the driver changes are either platform agnostic
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+or are similar between earlier platforms (hence we start with SDVs).
</span>
Having an Nvidia-card, should I be worried about this? So far I’ve read so many “Nvidia bad, Wayland no work” posts that I have just stayed clear waiting for a final confirmation that everything is smooth sailing.
I’ve been using Wayland on Nvidia with plasma for about a year and it’s been mostly fine. Only a few minor issues like night color not working or some Xwayland apps flickering, but the system feels far more responsive on Wayland so it’s well worth it to me
On much more recent driver versions Wayland support has been further improved. I suggest going with Fedora Silverblue since RPM Fusion is pretty quick to roll out new driver versions.
Having swapped to Linux on Pop OS and later onto Nobara recently, I strongly disagree.
As my personal experience on 525, 535 and even beta 545 with a 3080, so much as swapping onto a Wayland session implied lag, screen tearing issues, and stability issues / crashes on KDE and GNOME, to the point that I ended up selling the 3080 for a 7900 XTX because of how everyone said the AMD experience is so much better and it is.
True that I havent tested it on a laptop so maybe Optimus support from Nvidia or the latest drivers have added stability overall, but this was definitely a problem in desktop for the last months to me.
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