A few months back we had a bad wind storm. I was driving home from work in the dark that night on some back country roads. I come around a curve and see some asshole with a flashlight in the middle of the road. Thankfully I wasn’t going too fast and I was able to break to a stop without slamming on my brakes.

Turns out it was a lady who lived in a house on the road. One of the old trees from the forest there had fallen into the road, blocking both lanes. With no streetlights there was a good chance if she hadn’t been there, I would have ran into it.

As I got out of my car, she told me she was watching to make sure no one hit the tree. She had called the towns emergency line but the police were tied up with other issues from the storm.

Some guy came out of his house up the way a few minutes later. He had a chain saw with him. He, myself, and another driver worked to clear any debris in the road. 5 minutes later the road was perfectly clear, and the driver and chainsaw guy walked off without saying any words.

Those people likely saved myself from car damage, as well as a good 20 minutes at least from having to find an alternate route home.

You made a good choice!

Framework if you have the money. Otherwise Dell.

Every single lenovo product that isn’t a thinkpad is a nightmare to repair. Their keyboards are plastic rivited in place, so you have to swap out the entire top half of the chassis to replace the keyboard. I’ve had unending issues with their ideapad line motherboards. That laptop went through two replacement motherboards and was out of commission for months. The build quality of their all-in-one is terrible and you have to do a complete disassembly to add ram. I say this as someone who had to do small business IT. I have fixed 4 separate models from them and each one had terrible build quality. Also, dont forget about the superfish scandal.

Asus is fine. I and several friends have had many of their laptops. Though one of my friends had the motherboard on his TUF line completely died out of no where.

Dell’s build quality and repairablitity remains solid. Easy to source replacement parts. Good Linux support. I’ve had the fewest problems with their hardware

Also checkout framework if you have the money. Good stuff from them. Really how laptops should be. Each part has it’s own qr code so you can immediately identify it and get a replacement if needed. It’s amazing.

So I think there were a few issues.

• the original pinephone was basically too slow to be usable
• there were a few hardware quirks that had to be fixed in software but made mainlining drivers for it difficult
• the lack of community updates (and you could argue overall community management) caused some developers to move away while also impeded pine64s ability to attract new developers
• the lack of any sort of funding for developers made it difficult for people to work on as any more than a hobby (not necessarily pine64’s fault, but it’s the reality)
• poor battery life (better idle and sleep support would have been software issues but the hardware was designed to be cheap instead of really useful)
• daily driving Linux on a phone is a poor experience - not pine64s fault but there’s a bunch of support missing in Linux that needs to be developed before early adopters can really use Linux phones. Modem power management, audio switching between Bluetooth and speaker, MMS support, camera support, etc.

I have a minisforum v3 that I’m not using - just don’t love the surface style form factor. I’m willing to sell it for a good price if anyone is interested. Based in USA. Feel free to DM me

Avoid lenovo. Their build quality went to crap and they’re easily the least repairable laptop on the market these days.

I’ve had to repair 4 lenovos within the last few years. Cheap parts and the laptops all had their keyboards plastic rivited to the top shell of the chassis, making it impossible to replace without buying a new chassis. One of the laptops had to have two motherboard replacements before it was usable.

Their all-in-one doesn’t have a frame around the LCD panel, and they didn’t put access doors in the back panel. So if you want to upgrade the ram or ssd you have a 70% chance of breaking the screen.

Iirc the watches ship from China, international buyers won’t get hit with us terrifs

Great advice. Framework is the best choice if you can afford it. Seconded your opinions on Lenovo. They’re absolute trash now.

Onshape has a free tier, though all the cad files you make in it are publically available. That being said, it’s easy to use and, since it’s browser based, completely comparable with linux

Some of the installs can be a little weird, but I’ve never had anything that I couldn’t get running. Vscode has an install for tumbleweed https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

The major “issue” is the package names are different between Debian and tumbleweed, so if you’re installing software from github that isn’t directly provided by suse/appimage/flatpak then a lot of times you’ll need to install the dependencies manually by finding the corresponding packages (since most github repositories have directions for Debian/Ubuntu and not suse)

Or you could just use distrobox

I’ll +1 tumbleweed. Rolling and stable, it’s been great

I had no idea that (open)SUSE was so security minded in their packaging. It makes sense in retrospec. It sucks they didn’t catch this earlier, but this response makes me happy to use tumbleweed

Yeah he really didn’t handle it well

Edit: Here’s a link to the thread https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9

I’ll second tumbleweed. I use it on 4 separate devices and its rarely given me any issues. If it does, it has built-in recovery snapshots - it takes 30 seconds to roll back a bad update.

New thinkpads are trash unfortunately. Lenovo really cheaped out on their build quality. I’ve had to fix multiple lenovo laptops and one of their all-in-ones and the corners they cut made the repairs either impossible or extremely difficult.

One new ideapad had to go back to them twice with motherboard issues.

Replacing the keyboard is impossible, you need to replace the whole front panel of the case becuase the keyboard is plastic rivited in place.

The all-in-one started as a simple ram and storage upgrade, but in order to do that the whole back panel needs to come off. Its snapped on but the LCD panel itself doesn’t have any subframe around it, so when opening the back panel theres a very high chance of you cracking the display.

New thinkpads are trash unfortunately. Lenovo really cheaped out on their build quality. I’ve had to fix multiple lenovo laptops and one of their all-in-ones and the corners they cut made the repairs either impossible or extremely difficult.

One new ideapad had to go back to them twice with motherboard issues.

Replacing the keyboard is impossible, you need to replace the whole front panel of the case becuase the keyboard is plastic rivited in place.

The all-in-one started as a simple ram and storage upgrade, but in order to do that the whole back panel needs to come off. Its snapped on but the LCD panel itself doesn’t have any subframe around it, so when opening the back panel theres a very high chance of you cracking the display.

As others have said, nvidia will work but you’re better off with amd for the GPU. CPU brand doesn’t really matter.

If you’re duel booting, I definitely recommend two separate drives, one for each OS. Use the bios boot selector to boot between the two. It makes things much much easier if they’re not sharing a drive

But we know based on OPs usage requirements, he’s not one of those people doing everything in the browser.

Updates are important regardless of fomo. They’re not only for adding new features, they’re for fixing bugs and improving stability and these changes rarely get backported unless their critical.

The core Debian might be stable, but, for example, plasma 6.3 is much more stable than 5.27

Debian is stable and will work, but there are other options that are basically as stable and have much newer packages - improving desktop stability and user experience

Debian 12.9 was released a few months ago based on kernel 6.1 LTS, the latest kernel is 6.13, with 6.12 being the new LTS.

Debian packages are updated for bug fixes and security updates, but they generally don’t update to new versions.

If you’re running KDE Debian, your version is plasma 5.27, meanwhile 6.3 was just released.

There are a massive amount of quality of life improvements that debain 12 stable will never get. Sure you can backport some, but then it’s not really debain stable is it?

Meanwhile there are plenty of other distros that are almost just as stable, but have newer versions of everything. Not to mention the stability improvements of the newer software (one example is plasma 6.3 is a massive improvement over 5.27)

Like I said, I love Debian, but if you’re doing daily driving of the computer, I think there are better alternatives

Have you looked at tumbleweed? Its a rolling release so its always up to date but opensuse’s testing is fantastic. It’s very stable and on the off chance there’s a regression that impacts usability, it has built in version snapshots. It takes literally 45 seconds to roll back to a previous working version.