Framework was and is certainly high on my list, but I’d rather go in a used direction and I do have concerns about them sponsoring hyprland and omarchy, and I haven’t seen anything about them backing down on their statements.

If I were to categorize what I consider most important as far as upgradability goes, it would be the following:

1. Storage - Drives fail, full stop. It needs to be replaceable. Storage can also be a backup to ram, so if that isn’t replaceable something needs to be. My experience with a 32gb nonreplaceable storage laptop has soured my entirely on non-replaceable storage.

2. Ram - Ram can fail and as technology proceeds, ram tends to be the most expendable resource as technology progresses. So as time goes on, what you started with just won’t cut it in the future. I don’t see this changing anytime soon, so it either needs to be upgradable or way overboard in capacity and to a lesser degree speed.

3. Secondary components (wifi, bluetooth, etc.) - I honestly don’t mind replacing these components with a usb dongle, but it sure would be nice to replace the internal components and leave USB ports free.

4. Graphics - I’m not a laptop gamer, I don’t see it as the place for it. While there are some processes that would benefit from a better GPU, I feel like mobile CPUs cover that aspect very well.

5. CPU/motherboard - A replaceable cpu is a rarity to find in a laptop, and processing power/watt doesn’t seem to have a huge difference within generations which is probably my most important factor in a laptop. Sockets change so often and chipsets aren’t often compatible with newer chips that I don’t much see the point if the motherboard isn’t replaceable. It would be cool to have a replaceable motherboard, but considering how fine I am with older technology, I think even those would still be outdated by the time I start considering that anyway.

Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.

The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.

The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.

Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.

Ubuntu has started going off the deep end. They’ve been heading in that direction for a while, but they recently (I guess like 5 years-ish ago) hit this corporatey, money-grabbing, mentality that’s so completely opposite of what made Linux great.

The feel I get about it is 10 years ago, tutorials were written using Ubuntu because it was an easy distro to use and was a great platform for beginners, so people used that as their platform to teach. Now it feels like tutorials are written using Ubuntu because they’re being sponsored to. A lot of how-tos I come accros have the same vibe as watching a video animation tutorial that uses adobe and oh gosh, it’s also sponsored by adobe. Or a networking tutorial sponsored by Cisco. I’ve actually started just looking to see if another distro is acknowledged before I actually see what they have to say.

There’s a very different feel if you’re trying to set something up and a website has “if you’re in this family of linux, here’s what you do, or if you’re in this one, do this” versus “so you want to set up x in linux? Here’s how you do it in Ubuntu”. It’s as if no other distro exists.

Anyway, ignoring that rant. Linux is super stable these days, you can take pretty much any distro and you’ll be fine. I tend to gravitate toward the base distros, like fedora, opensuse, and Debian over Rocky, mint, etc. I haven’t come across one in the past five years that gave me any trouble, except when it came to updated nvidia drivers and wayland. In which case some distros were behind a month or two on getting those updated.

Hey, I think I’ve seen this one before.

Vscodium isn’t in the repos for opensuse, but yes, this user should have found a way to install it on bare metal in the first place.

I just had an issue with the vscodium flatpak, been using it for two months with no issue in an online course, got to learning GUIs, import module, doesn’t exist. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t there, installed three different python versions of it three different ways, still nothing. Couldn’t even get vscodium to point to a different interpreter that I knew was there (yet it doesn’t say it’s not there, just that some things won’t work). Still nothing. Three hours later, after trying everything I could think of, I realized that it was because I installed the flatpak version when it clicked that it worked in Geany and I didn’t have python 3.13 in my repos, yet that was the only one I could see in vscodium.

I want <device 1> to interact with <device 2> as if it was native

“KDE connect can probably do it”

Similarly, if you go back even further into console and PC gaming history you can find some game that use what, looking back, would be considered terrible control layout and/or gameplay mechanics.

You can just say resident evil.

Just get some of these

No, read the article

Yeah. Wait til you learn that New Mexico is older than Mexico.

My stepkid had one of these exact ones. He pulled it out and the outside sleeve detached.

The internals on these are incredibly unsafe. There’s a very high chance you can rip it out, and the tines will remain plugged in, with nothing to grab onto to remove them. The tines themselves are only pinched internally by a weak little bit of metal to connect to the rest of it, not even soldered.

I’ve been forced to start calling these wall dongles by my fiancé, I made sure that in order to accept this terminology that wall warts with the cord attached are now dingle-dongles, and the ones with a cord before the electronics are dangle-dongles.

I was going to mention in another part of this thread about doom 2016 on the switch. The switch has no right to be able to play it, yet it’s fantastically playable.

Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.

I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.

I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.

Bob Vylan and Kneecap seem to be pulling their weight.

I’m mostly bottlenecked by IO performance and network speeds. So in order to happily take advantage of a blazing fast machine I’d need to do some upgrades everywhere else. As long as I don’t get one, I won’t feel the need to update. I got real close the other day transferring 1.5 TB of data to a backup drive over 1Gb after doing some file server to file server shenanigans over 2.4ghz wifi with a 32GB filesystem image.

FYI, decompressing an image on a fileserver back onto the server through a laptop, then writing the decompressed image on that server to a disk connected to said laptop, all over 2.4ghz WiFi, is a monumentally stupid way to do things. Many circumstances were involved, the biggest of which in this escapade was me unwilling to walk across the house because of… I don’t know, reasons. The second biggest being I had already pressed enter, so screw restarting the process in a way that would be 4x or more faster, I was already 10% done.

I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.

All of my old phones work fine as the last time they were updated. My 10 year old Sony xperia z3c would be fine except for security updates and it’s only 3g, and the storage on it is quite measly. I still use it everyday for playing music, though.

Most of the speed issues are google bloat. Play services are absolute hogs, and anything that needs them will not work on this phone, but everything that doesn’t is perfectly fine. So I’m basically stuck with f-droid apps. Which is fine, because it’s a glorified iPod at this point

I feel you and as a stepparent to an ADHD/autism kid, it will get extremely frustrating at times. Therapy might be necessary, it will help give you and your kid the skills to build…skills… to deal with things. Professionals are better at it than us. There are a lot of different ways ADHD/autism presents, and they all have different hurdles.

I highly recommend you start building habits now for the activities they struggle the most with and it is extremely important that you build self-care habits (taking breaks for water, food, shower, etc.), because if it doesn’t become a habit, it will become a struggle, and you will both struggle.

Its important to keep in mind that your kid will be struggling with happiness neurotransmitters. They’ll be searching for dopamine hits however they can, and it can lead to addictive habits that make things spiral and crash (videogames, foods, anything really)