None - see above.

Literally zero flex on the keyboard. I just pulled it out and pressed hard on it. No flex of the keys pushing down through the metal (like a gasket mounted mechanical keyboard would do), and zero flex of the aluminum.

I’ve been daily driving a framework 13 for like 9 months now. I’m pretty happy with it as a Linux machine.I can and will nitpick here to some of the points made in the article - but I’d buy another / recommended it regardless.

• the touchpad. It’s a diving board style. It’s also got a good amount of play in it prior to clicking. The diving board style means it’s tough to click at the top. Tapping works great. The extra play takes a little getting used to. It’s 1000% functional and works well - but if you’re snobby about trackpads, you won’t like it. It’s way worse than an Apple touchpad, but an upper end windows touchpad. The trackpads play also tends to allow “crap” and dirt to fall in there. I’ve had to take it apart once to clean it out (which is super easy to do on a framework, but it’d be nicer if I didn’t have to do it at all)
• the price - it’s a bit high for the specs. But that comes with the territory of a non glued laptop
• battery life is ok
• speakers are kind of crappy. They are fine, but they ain’t wowing anyone.
• the keyboard is ok

That’s it. 9 months of daily use, I love it, that’s my complaints list. The idea here is that someday, a better trackpad, or keyboard, or speakers will become available-and it’ll take me 5 minutes to upgrade. It’s a desktop laptop. And for me, everything “just works” on fedora 42.

Everyone overthinks it, and you are too.

Mint is great. It may not work for you if you have super new hardware.

Fedora is great. It’s mint but with newer stuff.

Arch is great. Bleeding edge. But it’s not “set it and forget it”.

Linux is great. There’s a million other options. Any of them work if they work for you. Find someone bashing Ubuntu - they would HAPPILY choose Ubuntu over win11.

And you have to realize the “what version I’m on dependency hell” thing is a thing of the past for the most part. Flatpaks just about solve this problem. You’ve got containers and vms too. Switching to another distro ain’t hard either as a nuclear option.

Just install mint or fedora like everyone says. Your requirements aren’t special, and both options are great.

Same I run the flatpak app on fedora workstation 42 with zero issues.

Has that ever happened across drives? Without user error?

Every Linux distro I’ve ever used has been pretty damn specific about where it installs boot, and respectful of all other drives and boot loaders.

I’ll concede defeat, but I find your claim hard to believe.

Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.

LOL

I’ve been using it that long too, and I suppose you’re right.

• Reads this on his iOS phone
• While playing modern games on fedora workstation 42
• While all my backups and containers run on a synology nas
• with a literal blank 2nd hard drive that used to have windows 10 on it but now has nothing
• while his computer illiterate wife uses her hp laptop just fine with linux

Ya… Go f yourself Microsoft. You used to be the cool kid in town. Now you’re trash.

Ok this is interesting. I wasn’t aware flatpaks could update on their own. I thought it was either “flatpak update” OR the package manager gui helper kicked off flatpak updates. I’ll have to dig into this on fedora. I’ve been running arch/endeavor for so long, it never occurred to me fedora may be auto updating flatpaks.

I agree. I’ll check and report back tonight once I get home from work. It happens often enough, I might even be able to catch it in the act.

I agree that’s what it sounds like. Except I haven’t updated anything - or if something did update - it happened on its own.

Third for fedora. IMO the new “it just works” distro in place of Ubuntu - but a little more current than Debian.

Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.

That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.

It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

Another vote for fedora here.

I use regular workstation. I like gnome so that fits. And I found when I set up arch exactly the way I liked, I was just recreating the fedora experience ;)

It’s not bleeding edge but I don’t think anyone really needs that unless you just bought a brand new vid card or mobo etc. If your components are common and 6mo+ old fedora is new enough.

I really don’t have issues with it. It seems to have become the new Ubuntu (install it and it just works).

Openrgb is what you want. It’s tricky to figure out though. It’s not just going to recognize the device and poof magic. You’ll have to fiddle with HOW it’s connected - through your rgb header, bios settings, separate controller etc. Once it’s recognized, you may have to play with the settings for how many lights it has etc.

When I first used it, it thought it didn’t do anything. Then I learned and got it to do everything.

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.