“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5” IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive:
Honestly, I rather like the default XFCE terminal. In fact, I was using it even before I used XFCE back when I was just playing with the default GNOME in VMs before I daily-drove Linux.
Is this xfce-winxp-tc? I ‘ve played with it before and it’s awesome.
However, I don’t use it because while the XP start menu replica is cool, I need a Win7-style search bar, and Whiskermenu sticks pit like a sore thumb here.
I think a 7 replica would be awesome, but I think some parts of Aero can only truly be replicated with a new WM and DE, such as the color changes in the taskbar for different applications. Many themes just fall short - proportions and effects are slightly off and such.
I think the main other distro I used in that VM at that time was Fedora 37 at that time, which should have also been using Wayland. I had made the VMs because I was working on Debian packaging for an application I liked and wanted to make sure the modifications I made didn’t break it on other distros.
I’m not necessarily a “Wayland is the embodiment of evil” kind of guy, but I love XFCE and pretty much won’t leave it unless it dies, meaning I’m on Xorg until they port XFWM4.
Not really, but I switched from Qwerty to Workman years ago, though I can live with Qwerty if I have to when it’s on someone else’s machine.
I use Workman because I found Colemak rather hard to learn, mostly because of the position of S being one over from where it was on Qwerty.
In order for them to be allowed on exams, I ghink they’re required to have a non-QWERTY layout.
Linux (and I think maybe even macOS) can do Ctrl+Shift+U, and then you type the Unicode hex number.
Discord also has an app from Linux - you can get it as a Flatpak (an official one) or as a native package, although they don’t provide a repo for native packages and expect you to manually download a package file every time there is an update.
For the native packages issue, someone created an apt repo on Github, and if you look in the CI routine, you can tell they’re using the official Discord packages and not modifying them.
Honestly, I should probably be sandboxing it more.
It’s annoying to use a proprietary service, but the This Might Be a Wiki community is rather enjoyable.
It’s not just packages. Ubuntu performance is terrible - it runs so much worse than other distros in VM. I don’t know about spins, but main Ubuntu takes 30 seconds to respond to some button presses whereas it’s nearly instant in other GNOME-using distros given equal or less resources.
I use Debian with XFCE, but while I love XFCE, it might not be everyone’s thing. If you do give it a try, make sure to use Whisker Menu instead of the default app menu, and also set keyboard mappings to your liking.
P.S: Ubuntu’s pushing for Snaps, not Flatpaks. Flatpaks are actually pretty good - makes it really easy to install a newer software version when the one in Debian repos doesn’t suffice.
Also, it’s not only Ubuntu pushing for Wayland - most distros or DEs either have it working or are working towards it (there are some exceptions). XFCE is still on xorg, but working on Wayland. The problem is xorg is on life support and not getting a lot of new features.
I’ve had a very good experience with a similarly-speced AMD E16 gen 1.
The only issue I’d warn you about is the Wi-Fi modem might be a Realtek on some models. Mine came with one, and while on recent kernels, it mostly worked well out of the box, it had one issue: something went weird with ACPI when I switched between certain networks, which caused the card to crash and completely disconnect to the system unless I rebooted. I was able to find a fix by changing some options with modprobe.d, which I detail here: https://startrek.website/post/14342770 . Since that, it’s been an extremely smooth experience.
Same. I love my E16 Gen 1.
For battery life, I’d recommend you install CoreCtrl so you can adjust your power settings. That, combined with a few other things (I think the Arch Wiki covers most of them) allows me to get quite a lot out of my Thinkpad in Debian.
Why does that lock oddly like the iOS 10 default background?
I’ve had a good time with my Thinkpad E16 Gen 1 over the past few months (definitely lower spec than your machine - pretty much all of them have only an iGPU). A lot of them are still upgradable - I upgraded mine from 8GB of RAM to 24GB, and the thing had dual drive bays, so I just left the stock 256GB Windows drive and put in a 2TB alongside it for Linux stuff.
As long as you have a recent kernel, hardware support is decent, so long as you avoid the models with Realtek (my E16 does have Realtek, but I managed to smooth out issues).
BTW usually the graphics glitches weren’t immediate, but would come after waking it from sleep a few times.
As an ex-Linux on Surface Go 1 user, I didn’t like the experience. Under Debian Testing, it was always mostly usable, but I’d come across the weirdest bugs, like graphics glitches. Also, last time I checked, the camera was miserable to set up - I got it working, but it’s really weird. Secure boot was also really painful.
Running Linux on the Surface Go made me curse the Surface line and put the Go in a junk drawer. I might go back to it one day, but I have no reason at the moment. Still, if you already own one, it’s worth a shot.
If you go ahead, though:
Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.
Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn’t be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).
PS5 controller also works.