I just went through this with Dell xps 2 in 1 and surface pro 8 with mint and other OSes. Linux just is not fully ready for touchscreen it’s 90 percent there but for instance the last 10 percent is text boxes when clicking won’t spawn the keyboard, the keyboard regardless of input app is clunky, not phone grade speed, it’s possible but you my as well stick with a small 10 to 13 inch laptop. The folio is janky at best, using the slate solo is odd to hold and gets hot. Battery sucks. I tweaked and spent so much time wanting it to work. It just isn’t ready yet.

I like the SOG looks and approach but in use and the hand their are inferior to leatherman. If you get a multi-tool you go leatherman or Swiss army knife or Swiss multi.

Multi writer, KDE writer, Rufus, Mint stick. Take your pick depending on distro.

I love pocket organizers. You’d think its just adding another item to your pocket and it is. But for me i carry one with mini crescent wrench, telescoping magnet, emergency meds, chapstick, a sharpie, 2 regular pens, a pocket comb, I forget anything else off hand.

Vs the other pocket is not big enough for an organizer and it erks my nerve. Anything I need slides in and out and is organized quickly. My other pocket I have to dig for leatherman micra scissors, Bose earbuds, milmaukee flashlight, leatherman wave plus, Milwaukee 6ft mini tape measure, and a 16gb flash drive for odds and ends because you never know. Then you got a wallet with the usuals. Cell phone. Glock 26.

Edit: I like the idea of tiny zip ties, and a paper clip, good idea for reset buttons and such.

Preach.

As someone with half that list of health issues. I struggle everyday. Most people even family do not care they can leave, go eat, live life. I cannot. Nobody cares until it’s them. They will never understand, have the compassion, empathy, respect to even try to help you, not even to clean up after themselves for things that make you sick, (gluten issues and they leaves pizza crumbs and greasy pans all over counters and stove). Plenty of sorries to help their emotions feel better though. Nothing for you though. Not money to help with medical things. Not care to keep themselves in order. People do the bare minimum and the world is fine with it.

I don’t want to live like that, not as a parent, myself, or my family members. Shits hard. I don’t want to die or be dead so I’m not looking to OFF myself but fuck its hard to get through each day. It takes a solid, hard headed, self disciplined, never give up attitude to live like this. Yet you still fail to thrive and have any chance of health.

AMD no question. Avoid nvidia drivers And markup, and drivers get better with age. 6700xt best budget go up from there.

What I did was I bought a new Opal Tadpole and plugged it right in and it is one of the smallest clip on 4k webcams you can buy. If not the true smallest. I used it once. Otherwise new in box if your interested. I’d take 100 for it. It’s really small so it stays out of the way. Only reason I’d part with it is because I switched away from the surface pro 8 where I needed it and back to a dell laptop and distro where I no longer need it. Used literally once. New with box.

Just an FYI. I just went through a giant debacle doing this. Surface pro 8 top of the line 32gb ram model. DO NOT expect the touch to be phone or daily driver ready. Text box keyboards do not pop up or if they do its so delayed in typing that you’ll give up using it. ZERO 3rd party software closes the gap, onboard or any other keyboard that is virtual won’t help. Stick with the Folio or keyboard and mouse and your good. Linux is no quite there for touch support atleast not Mint.

The battery life will be a few hours at best even tweaked to hell for energy savings. It will get hot under any real usage beyond browsing and a handful of tabs. Especially while charging and using.

I tried the new Dell 2 in 1, the Surface pro 8, I ended up back on a laptop its just smoother and easier and the overall hardware is better including battery. I was wanting this to work so bad. The slate concept seems good on paper but not IRL. There’s a reason they haven’t gained as much traction in the market as you’d expect.

I didn’t so a reinstall I simply swapped my ssd into another PC. When I sold my amd rig. System logs show no errors that im aware of when in the GUI system reports in mint. It’s works fine on windows but on mint it cuts off about 5 percent of the screen or 10 all the way around. So I’m missing the start icon and such. I have never deletes nvidia files or configs. I’m used to amd and never used nvidia before. I did however try every driver from noveau to 575 open. All of them made no difference or made it worse.

I tried all drivers and done all display settings. I’ve changed resolution and refresh. I can’t for the life of ms figure this out. Anyone at all please help… Its so frustrating I don’t even use my PC anymore.

My 2080 has issues and cuts off part of the screen on Linux mint. My 6700xt and amd setup would never. I switched and tried every driver. I’ve never used nvidia. Anyone have advice?

Edit: it was some stupid AI scaler on the SmArT TV. What joke.

Mint or fedora. Skip Ubuntu. Updates break things too much. If you got mint I’d recommend LMDE over Ubuntu mint. For the same reason so long as your not on brand new hardware. Mint is honestly the easiest way to go. Fedora being second. Bazzite if you want to have a steam OS like experience.

Are they trying to take it away to make it the norm of being energy efficient?

At one point it was breaking my Mint install having to learn how to fstab and do all sorts of commands to get my data back. Took me something like 11 days and it wasn’t just UUID errors I somehow borked it so bad there was multiple files wrong. I’ve now learned a ton. I’ve done it atleast 6 times more and can fly through fuck ups in minutes. I nearly gave up. Encryption isn’t always the easiest to play with either.

Edit. After reading the other comments you were serious about eating/chewing no hard problems one had solved. AKA accomplished.

Probably the inside of a tootsie pop that was so hard and chewy it nearly dislodged my tooth. Pulled out a filling. I bit down on it and couldn’t get my teeth separated in the back it was like glue. Fucking good though. I eventually won.

This could very well be it. I highly doubt two separate trees merged and cellular connections formed to meld into one tree. It would be like two organisms forming a super organism. Combining. When has anyone seen that ever?

I haven’t ever found a better open source keyboard or voice type than futo. It really is that good. With so many languages. I’m unsure why some of them got downvoted but oh well. I’m sure there’s a ton more to add that are privacy focused open source apps but those were off my head.

VeraCrypt, Clonezilla, Joplin, Futo voice and Futo keyboard, Sentry, Wasted, Untracker, WTMP app, Fossify app suite.

I’ve had a live linux USB drive that I literally have never used since creating it 15 years ago and it still runs the live ISO just fine. Again slow as hell as it’s like USB 2.0 or something but still works.

If a live ISO still works then I’d be willing to bet most other stuff will too, given it didn’t sit at the bottom of the ocean.

It’s been in my pocket for years having never seen actual use. No USB cap either. Dirty and the housing is only covering half the USB. Remind me and I’ll post a photo. It’s wild to see. The housing is loose nearly off entirely and hanging on by a thread but it’s last through time like a tank, change and tools in my pockets daily. I only keep the old fucker at this point for seeing how long it’ll last still spinning up the live iso Linux spin I wrote on it.

This is a non issue and so overblown. I’ve had flash drives for a decade and some for 15 years and they have no housing at all at this point and you can plug them in and they run great albeit slow as hell for live USBs but flash drives are super durable.