When it freeze, after you’ve rebooted it, try running sudo journalctl -p 5 -b -1; you might see something in those logs.

Maybe also open a task manager before you do anything graphics intensive, just to see if there’s a process that rapidly increases its memory usage; while it might not be the cause, I’ve experienced similar freezes when I use all my memory (on a machine with 32GB of RAM).

FYI Don’t use this command. I think it was intended as a joke, but I just want to clarify.

Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.

Probably would work well on OpenTTD for similar reasons.

Honestly, there’s a bit of an “if I had a nickel” meme for open source reverse engineered clones of Chris Sawyer tycoon games, although it would be 3 nickels rather than the traditional 2 due to OpenLocomotion.

That is kind of awesome.

I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.

At least animated WEBP is kind of good; APNGs have huge file sizes and are not widely supported.

Still, this meme made me laugh.

Lossless webp actually has slightly better compression than PNG.

Most browsers support it, but most web apps, including some Google Suite stuff ironically, don’t support uploading a webp.

May I ask what your config was, such as distro, packaging format, and extensions were used? Also, what hardware?

Additionally, what issues specifically were you experiencing specifically? Were sites just loading slowly?

I ask because I’ve used recent versions Firefox on decently old hardware with 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores and had almost no problems. Everything rendered correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. I’d be curious to know why that isn’t happening for you.

Huh. I guess 3 years of Debian usage has just gotten me used to stuff like that.

I can see where one might go wrong; there’s a lot of sections in that guide with contingencies only meant for specific situations, like upgrading from a USB or optical disc.

May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).

Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.

• Blink is resource intensive and has so many non-standard APIs for the sake of Google’s version of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
• WebKit takes 50 years to support the newest standards.
• Gecko (Firefox) is non-modular and is limited to being used in Firefox, Thunderbird, and forks and Firefox as a result. Its performance is also somewhat worse than Chrome’s, but not noticeable for daily use.

Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.

Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.

Did you restart the computer after the upgrade and before reinstalling third party repo packages?

The “half the programs not working” kind of sounds like you had packages compiled for a newer libc and the like but the newer libc wasn’t in memory yet because you hadn’t restarted.

May I ask how your Debian upgrades go wrong?

I mostly say so because I recently upgraded from 12 to 13 with almost no issues; the only issue was something with Apache that ended up being a quick fix. I followed the official Debian guide and temporarily remove third party repos and packages.

True.

External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.

I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.

As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.

I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.

Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.

This should just be working if it’s standard USB audio; I’d recommend just researching issues with USB headphones in general. Maybe also try another cable.

If nothing works, it looks like you can use a double 3.5mm cable on this model, which pretty much every large retailer with an electronics section should have.

Debian Stable. Get it installed, get everything working right and configured the way this person likes it on a reasonable DE with default themes, and more likely than not, you won’t have to touch this thing for years.

The setup’s not necessarily for noobs, but if you’re the one doing the setup, you should be able to get it into a place where it will pretty much never break for them.

You should probably give them KDE or GNOME (probably KDE, as it’s more Windows-like and less my way or the highway than Gnome). As much as I love XFCE, it’s probably a good idea to give a layman a feature-heavy DE so that nothing is likely to be missing; also, it’s way too easy to accidentally delete panel items or entire panels on accident and a little annoying to restore things back to the way they were. KDE’s panels implementation mitigates these issues.

I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.

What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.

Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.

Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.