Same here, saw the writing on the wall after 7 and tried Linux gaming a few times but it was rough back then so I always came back. I did however start at least dual booting with 7 onwards so apart from gaming I was a convert at that time.

This year finally got tired of all the crap, them trying to railroad AI junk in, ruining the control panel, absolutely BURYING settings, turning ones back on with updates, the entire operating system is a dark pattern when it used to be so much more streamlined. Switched to Bazzite and it feels like I’m almost back to Windows 7 except I don’t have to install drivers or anything, just install it, add any apps through the store and you’re off. What they’ve done to windows is ridiculous to me and I’ll never come back.

WPEngine has been trash for a few years now but this felt like a weird way to handle it, I don’t love that they gobbled up ACF and DeliciousBrains and slowly began enshittifying their products which do feel almost necessary to core

My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box

I did this with Qubes a year ago and haven’t had any issues apart from figuring out the right flags to get the full performance, otherwise the GPU would cap around 30% under load with low CPU load.

Kind of at the mercy of what your motherboard and bios will allow, mine I had to cheese a little and disable the PCI device on boot so I get to decrypt my disk with no screen lol but it works!

Not op but I do a lot of architecture and infrastructure work on top of my normal dev work so keeping everything separated and per-client has become a pretty important advantage for me personally

Fwiw I had to tinker a bit to get good video playback, Fedora was always choppy for me for some reason but debian is typically smooth with hw accel disabled.

As for the gaming, depending on your setup (I have a desktop and T480 I keep in sync) you can absolutely run two video cards and do PCI passthrough on one to a gaming VM. I have mine set up with a dedicated NIC and USB card and just use a KVM to swap between Qubes and Windows (for now) and it’s worked really well. Had to play around a ton to get the full speed out of the GPU though and it only seemed to work in windows so hopefully get that going for a Linux hvm one day.

Absolutely agree there is no going back, I have all of my work stuff entirely hardware agnostic and a full on replica of my work desktop ready to go in a moment should the desktop die. Apart from that keeping client work isolated has been such a game changer.

Fwiw I used to daily an x210 and then an x230 in IT and pretty frequently typed with one hand while carrying with another without the weight bugging me but your mileage may vary.

You can definitely send them flying and not damage them my coworker launched theirs across the office and the bezel just snapped back together.

I have a T480 now since I do more dev work and needed a slightly bigger keyboard/screen and it’s phenomenal with Qubes and 48gb of memory on the quad core i5. Love the ease to repair I just swapped a motherboard on it in around 30 minutes and was back up and running

Just research ahead and don’t buy one with a known hardware defect such as the 5As which are notorious for frying motherboards and screens. Went through 5 of them with the extended warranty over my phones life and they all died while in my hand abruptly. Less than a year or life per device almost always failing around 8 months for me.

If grapheneOS wasn’t so damn good I would’ve left pixels after that, Pixel XL abruptly died, 2XL had both cameras and the fingerprint sensor die out of nowhere, then the 4 5As. On an 8a right now and love it so fingers crossed it lasts!

If they had a user repairable device that ran it I’d buy it in a heartbeat

Definitely keeping me far away from upgrading, newest vehicle is an early 2000s Corolla and still does 40mpg.

Honestly with how cheap and easy it is to fix at home, barring safety improvements I really don’t see a point in upgrading. Infotainment is just another component that will eventually go obsolete like the ones from ~2010 that are dog slow and a pain to go aftermarket on.

Adding to this, automatic plate flippers exist and are pretty popular for show cars to display something else when parked. Typically wired to ignition so it shows your plate only when the cars running.

Issue is if you street park dependent on the state, if the vehicle registration is hidden by the plate being flipped they can likely tow it. Would work great for at work/in your driveway though. Could maybe just have a bypass switch for if you need to park somewhere and display the plate.

Still a pain in the ass that it’s this bad though.

I just use nextcloud as a target for backups (Aegis, Signal, QkSMS). Apps such as KeePassDX I have load the file via nextcloud. My contacts and calendar go through it as well, photos are just set to auto upload along with a few other directories.

As for the home screen layouts, I just take screenshots once I have it how I like and try to remember to take them again if I change stuff.

It’s not a full backup but I’m back up and running fairly quickly (Pixel 5A died on me 3 times in under a one year lifespan per device).

They used to dominate the consumer market prior to Ryzen so might have something to do with it but I got no evidence lol

I would never go back from qubes. VirtualGL seems promising for the hardware accelerated apps and GPU passthrough for a gaming VM is insane

You’ve insulted my entire existence I challenge you to a duel

I started with openscad and moved to freecad. Freecad is powerful but definitely not perfect but it has suited my needs fairly well.

I’m still a holdout for superslicer but I did migrate my profiles to PrusaSlicer for those sweet organic supports.

Yeah and they have no top end

I used to think people who downloaded videos on YouTube, forum posts with guides or useful info and other data were weird.

They were right.

With archive.org under threat some of it will be gone for good unfortunately. Save what you can when you can it might not be there later.

I’m patiently waiting for my 4th Pixel 5A RMA since they love frying motherboards outta nowhere but damn once you get grapheneos going it really is something else

Great rebuttal lmao

You can get some decent stuff for not much. Unfortunately harbor freight isn’t what it used to be but its still OK for basic hand tools. Major stuff I’d rent. I threw all my stuff in a duffel bag when I lived in an apartment and it worked decent but digging for tools sucked lol.

Would be cool if there were groups for it to get people started off and save a little money without buying anything