I don’t know the root of your ills on your server, but I have an interesting story to share (shared by my husband who was an engineer at the company mentioned below).

Back in 1998, the engineers at Be,Inc (who were developing BeOS, a beloved OS at the time) were experiencing kernel panics right after 7 am, on a specific computer. All of the crashes at around the same, while the computer was running tests all night. It had become a big mystery because they couldn’t find the bug.

It took them days, but they decided to sit around at 7 am to see what was happening. They saw that a single, strong sun ray was entering the room from the window, and was directly hitting the PC’s floppy drive (the PC was not completely closed up with its cover, since it was a test machine). They found that the sun ray would alter some bits in the electronics and what not, and would crash the kernel! :o)

They knew about it, don’t worry. It was our agreement. They saved their files too. :)

If you’re new, you should go with Linux Mint. It works great, and provides sane GUIs and defaults for everything, unlike most other distros. For a newbie, it’s the best decision. I’ve personally have had 5 people on Mint so far, who were originally unhappy that I formatted away their Windows partition when I told them that “I will fix it for ya” (when they came to me with their laptop because I’m a computer person), but they came to all love Mint. They said “why wasn’t I using this before?”.

I use Linux since 1998, and I still use Mint. Sure, I have other distros installed (Debian-Testing is my default on my desktop, many other distros on my various laptops), but Mint is the one I use the most. It just works. Just because I know how to fix something in the command line doesn’t mean I want to spend time doing it, GUIs are just fine!

In fact, I’m able to easily deliver both the MacOS and the Windows look, to lure new users in with Mint, haha: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114653608461737248

The US is not the world though. That’s something Americans need to learn. And having a solution for a single country does not work in the long run for that project. Not in the domain of OSes and phones. Either it’s universal, or it’s doomed to be a niche thing.

If you actually see what needs each country has for phones (by law), and also what needs normal users have, you would change your mind. It’s not just about one user here, one user there that doesn’t need these features, but the whole. I have an e/OS Murena phone (very private foss android fork) for example that I can’t use here in Greece because it doesn’t do banking (the bank app doesn’t work). Additionally, here in Greece we need gov apps (e.g. to get prescriptions, and to not have our ID with us all the time). These don’t run on “foss” versions of android (let alone clear linux OSs).

Tap-to-pay and car assistance are must-have in today’s world. 10-15 years ago, no. Today, yes. Bank apps is the other thing that can’t be done either (because bank apps want a “certified” system to run on). Here in Greece, it’s required you have a bank app on your phone to go with your daily life.

Yes, we all want a simpler life, like it was in the past, so we can envision an OS system that “it’s good enough”. But reality is not on our side. Linux as an open source community phone OS, made by non-commercial/non-corporate entities, can’t be an OS for the masses. It just won’t tick any boxes for them in today’s world. The current Linux phone OSes could be contenders 15 years ago, but not today.

Try the .appimage version, at least vscodium is coming in many different formats. I personally avoid flatpaks due to size and permission issues (e.g. gimp can’t use its special extra-featured printing panel, which makes it absolutely useless for me as an artist on a flatpak).

Thank you for the lucid reply. I already got a DELL 5640 16" laptop in the interim. It ticks all my boxes except the large size and the off centered trackpad. Otherwise it’s ok. Nothing amazing, but it’s fast and with a lot of RAM for the $765 euros that I paid.

A few days ago I posted about the same thing, I wanted a Mac-like laptop but running x86 so I could run Linux properly and not through hacks. 80% of the people in the comments suggested the Framework, and for a moment I was close to getting one. But I don’t think I would be fully happy with its clunkiness to be honest. Modularized stuff are clunky we like it or not. Yes, much better for repairability, but DELL also offers me two years on site support even here in Greece, so…

At the end, I bought this DELL. It’s coming with Linux, so I know it’s 100% compatible, and I paid only 765 euros on it (after removing VAT, since I bought it also for work). That’s half the price of a Framework, with a slicker design, and it’s fast-enough (15,200 passmark cpu points). The only compromise I had to make was that the touchpad was off-center, as it’s a large laptop. Other than that, it ticks all my boxes as per my post the other day.

No, there isn’t, however, NixOS is made by ex-freebsd people, and some of the philosophy has bled through there. Have a look at it.

You won’t. You will get crashes. This is a very old nvidia driver, which was barely working on x11, and not at all on wayland. Their newer drivers are more serious. You’d be best to upgrade your PC, not just an old amd card. I personally have found many bugs that DIDN;T exist 10 years ago on open source drivers. Basically, as the kernel evolves, and the old drivers become unmaintained, new bugs emerge. So it’s best to get something new, a new pc, and not try to make this old nvidia or old amd card to work. If you can spare $180, you’ll be in a much better shape.

Then check if your PC/power supply can run an AMD or intel gpu. If not, upgrade your PC. You can get a BeeLink minipc for $180 that’s faster than your current computer.

The same situation for any distro with newer kernels.

And that’s why I’d never buy an nvidia card laptop or PC. For my Debian PC that has a Xeon CPU (so it has no integrated gpu), I bought an Intel ARC GPU for $110. For what I do, which is video editing and encoding/decoding at 10bit 4:2:2 (which is what most modern cameras record as), it’s the best card on the planet. Better than nvidia and especially amd. Not so for gaming, of course. If your CPU is a 11th+ intel generation, and it comes with an intel gpu integrated, maybe you don’t need anything more than that. Just remove or don’t use the nvidia one completely. If you don’t have a gpu, get a cheap intel.

I own the Latitude 5480 from 2017. Terrible screen, terrible speaker, heavy… Not sure about newer models.

Sounds good, thx!

I understand. BTW, I am running Linux on my M1 macbook with UTM Qemu, and linux is really, really slow under emulation (faster if you run arm versions). Even on M3/M4.

The CPU generation is important because older ones don’t clock faster than my M1 macbook. If I’m going to buy something new, it better be faster than what I already have. GPU is also important, because before the 11th gen, 4:2:2 10bit video didn’t have video encoding/decoding, which I need. Also the trackpad is terrible (I have an X280 thinkpad), so is its speaker quality afaik. Thinkpads were great laptops for an older generation. I bought one because everyone was raving about them. Except its screen and keyboard, everything else sucks on it. It won’t even support some usb-c chargers (while other laptops don’t have an issue).

I already have 5 laptops. Laptops that range from 2800 passmark points to 5500 points (older Chromebooks usually clock between 1400 and 4000 points, so yours is probably in that range). I use these laptops as testbeds mostly, not as my main laptops for work/browsing. I need something faster than my M1 Macbook Air (which clocks 14,000 points – and that’s already 5 years old). So a 6th refurbished, old, slow laptop won’t do the job.

In fact, funnily enough, I’ve done the same mistake with video cameras back in the day. I was buying cheaper stuff, thinking that one feature here, or one feature there would make out for not buying a more expensive camera. They weren’t enough. I had to wait to 2024 to actually find the video camera that I was looking for in 2011.

Same for phones. Even after the popularization of the iphone and android, I still didn’t like them. I had to wait until about 2018-or-so, to feel that they had matured to the level I envisioned them 15 years earlier!

I guess I have certain ideas on what I want from hardware and anything less doesn’t cut it…

Did you even read the post with my required specs? :)