Love the sentiment, and I agree, but anti consumer surveillance tech is here to stay, sadly. Can’t tell you how many people in my life have Alexa, FireTV and random shit like that.
Been keeping an eye on postmarketOS, have been wanting to use it with a more modern phone in the USA, like a Pixel 4a or something. How has droidian been? Haven’t really heard too much about that project, its a full Linux distro? You can apt-get stuff?
Not sure you saw my edit, but I’ve been using a Dell Latitude 7490 for years and its been perfectly fine, so the issues you’re experiencing aren’t normal. Something is definitely up with your specific laptop. Just mentioning to help you narrow down issues.
Disclaimer: I’m an android user and would love to switch to a Linux phone.
Problem with android is updates being locked by carriers or Google themselves. To get updates after 2-3 years you basically have to buy a phone that has unlockable bootloader and supports LineageOS, AND you have to have the technical skills to Install and set up LineageOS, I do, but no one else I know does, they just happily buy a new phone because app X,Y,Z stopped working on their old phone, which is perfectly usable. And if you have a phone where bootloader is locked (I’m looking at you, Verizon, EVERY PHONE THEY SELL THEY LOCK), oops there’s an expensive paperweight, can never be running anything other than Android 8 or whatever it came with.
Haha that’s awesome! These days I’ve pretty much settled on basic defaults to make life easier: Ubuntu and Gnome. Though with snaps getting more invasive, I’m considering jumping ship and moving to the OG, Debian. I settled on Ubuntu years ago when they did a ton to improve driver compatibility and automatic installation for WiFi drivers on laptops back in the Ubuntu 7/8 days (2007/2008). Briefly tried out Linux mint in 2014, and went back to Ubuntu after a few years, gnome worked a bit better for workflow than the traditional windows approach with a taskbar for open windows.
Fluxbox… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… Back in the days of wintel dialup modems I was trying out Linux as a teenager and trying to get modem support working to get the internet, and at one point I tried out a Linux distro, DSL (Damn small Linux) because it was set up to be installed and run from a USB flash drive with persistent storage on the drive I think. And the window manager of DSL? You guessed it, Fluxbox! Can’t believe its still around.
Interesting because I’ve had the opposite problem historically. Windows always seemed to be doing random shit in the background, doing what? I can’t tell you but it always seemed to be using the disk or CPU to do some background process, and it always happened, every day at random times oops disk churn. You’ll notice it the most with a regular hard drive because it’s slow and makes noise when its being accessed (vs. an ssd which is silent)
Aaand that’s how badly Microsoft messed up the marketing for the surface line. I didn’t know the surface line had laptops, I thought the surface line was a tablets only (With the detachable keyboard base). 2 random internet people who are involved in the tech world had 2 completely opposite understandings of their product line because they made the marketing and branding so bad.