If it’s any consolation, my Dell XPS 13 with Windows 11 and a healthy battery gets about 40 minutes’ battery life and throttles due to heat when plugged in. It’s quite useless. Dell cares more about them looking slick than being actually useful. I also have an older XPS 13 with Tumbleweed and it runs cooler and lasts a bit longer, though battery life is still nothing special.
Not all of these mini PCs have a wifi card in them even if they have the antennas for it. You might start by opening it to check whether the wifi antennas are connected, or whether you need to add a WiFi card.
I think OPNsense would do what you’re looking for. I use it on a mini PC as my router, and it’s great, but I have not used it for WiFi (I run a separate access point). The limitation is WiFi hardware support. You will need to make sure your mini PC’s WiFi card has a driver in FreeBSD. Intel hardware is often a better bet than Realtek etc.
https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/interface_wireless_internal.html
Linux as your main OS with a Windows VM for work is a pretty decent arrangement. Windows works without activation so you don’t have to pay MS anything.
They do have categories, via the menu at the top:
True. Not everyone needs to chase the latest stuff, apart from security patches.
Recently I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, PopOS! and Ubuntu, as well as Mint, and all of these have comparable graphical software managers. Which ones are you thinking of that don’t?
Mint is not really for tinkerers. It’s a distro designed to work out of the box without the need to tweak anything, and it does that well. The downsides are that it’s not always the most up to date, and it bundles a lot so it’s not a slim distro.
It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.
I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won’t boot it makes recovery more difficult. It’s a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.
The notes there say that everything works except that the canvas flickers. Sounds minor but probably makes it unusable. Probably best to install it in a Windows VM if you need it. The Affinity stuff is very good.
Does Steam ever deliver Linux-native builds instead of running games through Proton?
Are there any actual controlled comparative studies of filesystems, rather than just anecdotes from the internet?
The article doesn’t mention or recommend Tumbleweed as far as I can see.
I know you don’t want to pay for their sync service and this is the self-hosted community, but I just wanted to note that they service does work well and gives you access to note history. I decided to pay because Obsidian is excellent and I wanted to support it. I just wish it were open source.
Coming from Windows I miss the excitement and suspense of never knowing whether my click on an icon actually got noticed by the OS. And the thrill of never knowing exactly which icon you clicked on because the UI is so slow to draw and redraw itself that the icons move unexpectedly while you’re aiming. Oh, and the unpredictable surprise of focus stealing.
I second this suggestion. I have an old touchscreen PC from about 2001 with a Via Eden CPU, which is an incredibly feeble low-power processor that lacks some instructions that were common even in 32-bit days, and Antix was the only reasonably modern distro I could get to run on it.
Honestly I can’t remember the details. It was a few months ago and it may have been just a temporary thing or a quirk of my installation. I think it had to do with some component relating to DBus not being present that I couldn’t figure out how to fix.
I had trouble using Flatseal to adjust permissions for Flatpak applications in Linux Mint. But that was a few months ago and may have been fixed. Other than that I never really had trouble with stuff being broken or unavailable in Mint.
I guess if you use very new hardware you might prefer a newer kernel than the one Mint uses. Or if you want the latest versions of packages, a rolling distro might suit you better. Or you might prefer a different filesystem. But if none of this bothers you, there’s no need to switch. Mint generally works well.
I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and “not responding”, or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.
Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.