In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.

Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.

Like, why the heck is Oracle still on this Earth? The only thing I can think of is MySQL, to which my response is, “Just use MariaDB.”

To be fair to Phoronix, I hardly think they’re the worst offender in Linux space; I find their Linux coverage to be the least terrible online. They cover new kernel and software developments pretty well.

Other Linux-focused sites seem to mostly consist of clickbait “Ditch Windows 11 headlines”, fleeting Linux apps, explaining something that there are already vast amounts of quality articles for, and/or thinly-veiled advertisements.

That is not to say Phoronix is perfect; I don’t necessarily enjoy having to run my ad blocker there. However, it’s not like it’s different on other sites. Comparatively, I find Phoronix to be a decent quality Linux outlet.

To be fair, it would be weird for Google NOT to support Linux, as I believe they use Debian Testing internally.

Personally, I find Debian pretty good these days. I used to default to Testing, but I’ve gravitated towards stable.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and Steam, almost any distro works.

Try seeing if your monitor has any weird power settings. I’d imagine it’s not a monitor problem, based on it turning back on after mouse movement, but perhaps it improperly responds to some message sent over the cable.

Speaking of that, what cable are you using? Is it HDMI or Displayport, and does the laptop have a full port or are you using a USB adapter?

That first part sounds like software/firmware stuff like mine, but the second part almost sounds like an antenna design issue.

Used to use Red Hat. This theme is for people who have nostalgia for back when Red Hat wasn’t a puppet of the blue monster - not the one that likes cookies.

Thunderbird’s not bad, but I usually use web stuff.

I have an existing iCloud e-mail that I haven’t had the time to switch off of. I then use G-Mail for school stuff - since I’ve signed away my soul to Google anyway, might as well use what they have to offer.

Maybe one day, I’ll start my own personal e-mail utopia, nut that day is not today.

Maybe Fedora?

Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.

Who would have thought? I’ve hardly touched Windows in over 2 years (mostly other people’s computers and the occasional app in my GPU-accelerated VM) so I haven’t kept up much.

According to the repair manual, my Wi-Fi card is actually replaceable, at least physically. I don’t know if Lenovo still does BIOS whitelists of cards like they used to (I think they did remove it a few years back.), but their OEM parts website has a diverse selection if this fix were ever to break.

I’d say other than the bottom being a bother to remove (and the keyboard not being designed to be replaced, though after some research, it seems possible), this is a surprisingly repairable laptop for how recent it it. It has dual SSD bays and a DIMM slot.

I totally agree with you on the Linux side. However, I first got into Linux by using it in Virtualbox on Windows. In the Windows world, as far as I know, it’s the easiest-to-use free-as-in-beer¹ hypervisor, so long as UEFI support has improved since I last used it.

1: I say this because of the non-libre extension pack.

As I have learned the hard way, it truly is.

I agree with Mint. I think Ubuntu has kind of devolved though, and PopOS is the better way to go. Fedora’s good too these days.

My recommendation is to try out a few distros in VirtualBox before switching - this was my process, and it can be very gradual.

I don’t use Mint, but I would guess that you could change your repos in /etc/apt/sources.list, run sudo apt update, and then sudo apt full-upgrade. Just make sure the full upgrade isn’t doing really dumb stuff like deleting a bunch of programs.

I could be completely wrong and this could be terrible advice, but this has become the wisdom for me when I use Debian Testing. Of course, I just did straight sudo apt update after Bookworm was released and the upgrade to Trixie went mostly fine. I have never upgraded between stable versions, so I may not be one to say.

I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.

While some of this can be a problem, I feel like using podman automatically disqualifies you as a regular user.

I think the more accurate title is “Linux is harder for medium power users who are already used to an operating system.”

I honestly feel I am unqualified to say how easy Linux distros are, as I often think to do things that a normal user wouldn’t, thus breaking my system in a way that doesn’t mirror what a regular user would experience.

True. Industry entrenchment would be a big issue. I can think of two ways to try to fight it. The less viable option would be trying for PSD support, which would be a lot of work. The other option would be to write a Photoshop plugin to allow working with the new file format in Photoshop. This might be annoying to end users having to deal with the format, but also easier developer-wise because you could make sure Photoshop handles rendering right; you’d just need a way to warn about operations in Photoshop that can’t be converted to the new FOSS program’s native format.

Not exactly “full of” - it was more like 3 classrooms with 30 each. Still a lot of Macs, but keep in mind this was a high school of 2000 students. Also, I’m pretty sure the Macs were paid for with grants for the visual arts programs rather than standard public funding.