MouldyCat

Got you, makes sense! If you took worse care of your devices, then it wouldn't be such an issue if a capacitor fails after just a few years. A company such as Apple is not going to be using bargain-bin components from random no-name manufacturers, and that should be reflected in better longevity even with heavy use.

Good luck in your search, and I hope you find the perfect beast for you!

What do you mean durable? As long as you are careful, and don't use it as a frisbee, any laptop can last for 10 years. If you travel about with it, get a proper laptop shoulder bag that fits it well and has a soft padded interior. Then keep the laptop in that when you travel, and don't squash it into a bag or suitcase.

Beyond that, simply look for the laptop that you like best. The Thinkpad is a meme laptop IMO. I had one for work, and yes it worked fine with Linux, but so did both the laptops I bought for myself, neither of which were Thinkpads. If you like the look of the Thinkpad, then go for it. Personally I don't really dig that clunky 90s aesthetic, I prefer laptops with a sleek minimalist aluminium look.

My advice is to make a checklist of everything you need and/or want in your laptop. How long do you want it to run on battery? What size screen do you want? What connectivity does it need - USB-C ports, a couple of USB-A as well? Do you want it to use a USB-C charger (this is very convenient when travelling)? What kind of touchpad, keyboard layout, how much RAM, what speed WiFi etc etc

Then simply start looking, and build a shortlist of laptops that appeal. Create a spreadsheet, with a column for each of the features you identified as being important in the last step.

Regarding Linux support, the best thing you can do is check reviews. Even if you buy elsewhere, Amazon reviews are great for this - you can search reviews for keywords, so when you see a laptop you like the look of, search for reviews that mention Linux, and check that everyone's happy and not complaining about unsupported devices. This is not the lucky dip that it used to be, but there are still problematic components like network adapters that may not work out of the box.

I have only had two laptops, the first of which I bought in 2018. It was an Asus, very midrange at £600. I prepared a live USB, booted on to it and checked everything worked OK, which it did, and then without further ado I installed Linux. The sensible thing to do would be to have left the "Windows rescue partition" intact for a couple of weeks until I was sure I was happy with the machine, but I just wanted all trace of Microshit purged from my shiny new machine, so I deleted it and set the entire disk as my single Linux partition (plus of course a small boot partition), and I never looked back.

The computer worked great, did everything I needed from it and was still going strong last year when I finally got a replacement. The laptop I have now is a Lenovo IdeaPad 5. It was also £600, and its performance is way better than expected, being way faster and more pleasant to use than my old Asus. it has an integrated Intel Arc graphics card, which is surprisingly capable. While my old laptop could only run vintage games, such as KOTOR, this new one is able to run current games on medium-low settings. I've currently got addicted to ARC Raiders, and it runs perfectly acceptably. Nothing like as smooth and pretty as it runs on my desktop PC at home, but perfectly good enough for me.

take my children out of school if they are forced to do face scans or give any ID

don't know where you live, but here in the ol' U of K, schools have been doing that sort of thing for over 20 years! I was appalled when I first heard about it, and I think it was from a friend whose kids had to give fingerprints. "Oh yes I know - big brother, but it's so convenient" was their attitude.

the double negative tripped you up - wasn’t unexpected == was expected

So HDMI 2.1 had been blocked by the HDMI forum, despite AMD having done a lot of work to try to persuade them that it should be allowed in the open source drivers. It's not clear to me why the forum was blocking it, although a comment on Phoronix says, "Which companies are shareholders in this organization? Ah...MS. Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom etc... Hummmm !!!"

Valve is rumoured to be behind some of the recent work on AMDGPU, motivated by the Steam Machine - a different comment on Phoronix says, "When the Steam Machine benchmarks came out, showing performance inferior to the PS5, I got the impression it was limited by software rather than hardware", which sounds plausible. Getting HDMI 2.1 working on the Steam boxes is likewise probably a priority for them, as some gamers won't switch away from Windows until it's there.

It's not mentioned in the Phoronix write-up, but I presume the implication is the HDMI forum has relented and finally given their blessing to this work, rather than Valve is just YOLOing it.

is it the thumbnail that appears in Lemmy for this post? I don't see where it came from, as I can't see it on the Phoronix article though

Outside of Big Picture Mode, the Steam client start-up performance is improved in general, improved CPU performance at runtime for Steam Input, and many bug fixes. The Steam client beta for Linux has improved download speeds on high latency connections, the SteamOS compatibility dialogs will now show in the desktop UI when installing games not verified for that hardware, and the desktop Linux UI will also show the SteamOS unsupported dialog when installing games that are known to not work with Proton. The Steam beta also improves its Linux distribution information collection for the Steam Survey to be more accurate. The SteamRT3 experimental beta has also seen several fixes.

The ridiculously slow start-up time has been an annoyance for ages, so I just switched to the beta to see if it's noticeably improved.

I did a quick unscientific test, timing start-up first on the standard client and then switching to beta, restarting my PC and timing the start-up again.

The non-beta time from double-clicking the icon until the UI was fully rendered was 25 seconds, and with the beta 18 seconds. Fingers crossed that's enough to make the start-up delay less bothersome in real-world usage.

ya .. I might have been trolling a little bit 😁

You are smart enough to suffer

Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don't even think it's possible to have a "primitive consciousness", or a "sophisticated consciousness". A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn't exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or.. you just don't - not even blackness.

Let's say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I'm assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.

You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you'd been resting on. "Woah what a weird dream" you'd think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.

Gay space communist here. I'm not vegan, not even vegetarian - I do however only eat vegetarian at home, and most of the time vegan, but I'll eat non-vegetarian food when visiting carnivorous friends or even in restaurants, if the veggie options are unappealing.

Honey is something I stopped buying after hearing from vegans about the cruelty in its production - from what I recall, and I did also watch a video or two of the process, queen bees routinely have their legs pulled off to trigger a hive to be built, and while I don't know if bees are conscious, I know I would never pull the legs off an insect, so I can no longer in good conscience put a pot of honey in my basket as I walk around a supermarket.

Similar logic should also apply to cheese and ice cream, the non-vegan items that I still buy a lot of, but I did try giving up these items for a couple of months, and man I'm sorry baby calves but I just love those things too much.

Beats me. If the USSR had won the Cold War and taken over the world, we'd all have way better games consoles AND they'd be given out for free to everyone who asked.

Was it Andy Burnham by any chance?