I don’t know specifically about the T470, but if you have an nvidia GPU, you might have issues depending on how the display outputs are connected to the GPUs. I had a T420s at some point with an nvidia GPU, and it was a PITA to get the display output to work on linux. I had to permanently enable the nvidia GPU for that to work (cutting battery life in half), because the display output was connected only to the nvidia GPU. I swore to never buy an nvidia product ever again after that experience.

I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a few videos about windows users switching to linux mint lately. Having to update the kernel for the computer to work is a common occurrance. IMO the newest available one should be the default one. We should strive towards giving new users the best possible first impression of linux.

They really need to update Mint though. Sure it is good… on old computers. Anything made the last couple of years will have issues due to an ancient kernel and mesa. We should stop calling it stable/lts and unstable, because users will always pick the one called stable, even if the ‘unstable’ one is the one that would in most cases work the best for desktop linux. Or at least we should separate the kernel and mesa away from the rest of the ‘stable’ packages, and include recent versions of that by default, to not scare away people with driver issues.

The scary thing about this is thinking about potential undetected backdoors similar to this existing in the wild. Hopefully the lessons learned from the xz backdoor will help us to prevent similar backdoors in the future.

Usually you can fix that with

pacman -S archlinux-keyring

If it is network connected, consider giving it a static IP in the router. I can imagine the computer being confused by the printer having a new IP since last time (can happen with automatic IP), when you try to print something.

I remember reading somewhere that btrfs has good performance for gaming because of deduplication. I’m using btrfs, haven’t benchmarked it or anything, but it seems to work fine.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a lot more spare time to tinker with linux when I was a student than after, having a full time job. But I guess if you only have the one computer and need it to work, then tinker in a VM or something. Don’t wait with tinkering and learning about linux if it is interresting to you and something you want to spend time on. You might not have the time for it in a few years.

Half Life 3

I agree. Even though I use extensions for dock, desktop icons and appindicators, I respect the Gnome devs for keeping things opinionated. It allows them to focus on implementing core functionality well, rather than having to support every customization option, which would clutter the settings and slow down development.

Next goal then would be vulkan 1.3 such that DXVK would work.

I feel like this is about tracking. As in microsoft want the PC to wake up and scan wifi networks to figure out where it is, so they can use this data for targeted ads they serve in the start menu and bing, etc.

I prefer rebasing on destination branch before merging. When merging you get all the conflicts at the same time. When rebasing you can address conflicts from one commit at a time. Untangling multiple small knots is easier than one huge spaghetti. Also commit history will be much cleaner.

Its likely that I wouldn’t use linux today if it weren’t for messing around with compiz settings on school computers back when I was a teenager. Wobbly windows and desktop cube was such fun. I guess that’s how we can recruit new linux users. Get them while they’re young. “But does your windows laptop do this?” wobble wobble closing application by lighting the window on fire.

I guess the closest to a decent FOSS piano plugin is MDA Piano, or perhaps search for piano samples. Perhaps someone has created a decent piano preset for the dexed FM synth (but will probably sound very 80s). I’m using pianoteq (unfortunately proprietary, but it has native linux support and sounds good).

Also pacman cache.

I’d recommend go back to arch. I use arch myself and have decided to stop distro hopping. I always end up regretting and come back to arch. The arch install script is quite good now, spares me hours of hunting down what packages to install for a working desktop and configuring of bootloader, etc, that I had to do before for installing arch.

Last time I tried something else was fedora. I liked the seamless experience, but I was annoyed by the very slow updates (why does it take soo long to refresh the repos?), and I missed the awesome wiki and package availability on arch.

I would just get a T530 which is basically identical but it doesn’t have the nvidia GPU. You can upgrade the screen to a W530 1080p one, they’re interchangable.

You will have problems with the nvidia GPU on a W530 on linux. Especially if you want to use the displayport, as that is connected only to the nvidia GPU. Basically the displayport won’t work without permanently enabling the nvidia GPU and disabling the intel iGPU, killing battery life.

Basically my general advice for a linux laptop is avoid nvidia at all cost.

Just a couple days late for me. Just got a new nvme SSD which needed a recent kernel to be successfully initialized on boot. So I had to make my own ISO (september iso had too old kernel).

Gnome. But I use 3 extensions (dash to dock, desktop icons and appindicators) and the adw-gtk3 theme so GTK3 apps looks the same as GTK4/libadwaita apps.