Start with a VM on your computer and see what you want to do/need from there.

Leaving a laptop on is (almost) free.

DSC is lossless compression.

1/3 of my refurbished drives died early. It tested fine before I put it in my raid array, but about 3 months in I was getting error after error. I swapped it with my spare and they’ve been fine so far.

What “merits” needing a CPU upgrade? I upgraded from a core i9 11950h to a 13900h machine because I needed more performance. That 11th gen machine still looks pristine besides one spot where a cat bit the corner of the lid. Even my piddling around machine wasn’t up to snuff and upgraded from a 10th gen i5 to a 12th gen system. That machine’s keyboard was a bit worn when I first got it, but it’s not (appreciably) worse now. Besides that and maybe the palm rest the chassis is in pretty good condition. Why does it matter if the keycaps are a little smooth? Or there’s a small scuff on one corner. Or a cat punctured the bezel of the display and somehow didn’t break anything.

You’re worried about the screen being worn out? How does a screen wear out (excluding maybe oled burn in, but this aint oled). And a good chassis shouldn’t show that much wear after a few years.

They’re still far better than everything else on the market.

IdeaPads also aren’t ThinkPads. Those are the consumer grade garbage you’d want to stay away from.

That’s cool. Performance per dollar isn’t the only factor for a laptop.

Size

Weight

Durability

Battery life

I/O and other features.

A not dogshit network card

An actually usuable trackpad

I’m sure I could list more. But those are all things that are important on a laptop and you can’t change after you buy it.

Windows Hello (and presumably modern Linux equivalents) use the camera + IR transmitters to work at least similarly to how apples Face ID works. In theory they should both be secure, but in practice who knows what they fucked up.

DWM

Forking splits the community, development resources, etc and ensures Linux will stay irreverent to the home user.

If everyone switches over to the fork that’s great. But let’s be honest. Ubuntu isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Ubuntu?

Just because it’s open source and anyone could theoretically fork it doesn’t mean it can’t be enshitified.

This is one.

https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/

What are you trying to run? a VPS is pennies, and a phyiscal server isn’t much more. We have a bunch of servers that are $40 a month each and they come with 5 usable IPs, 32 gigs of ram, 1tb SSD etc. The cost of getting a static IP for home will be almost as much as a server. If you want less you can get less for a lot less money.

I’ve self hosted my own personal website for years now and it’s not really an issue outside of the power going out and my IP changing. I just update DNS and move on. But if this is for an actual work? Just pay the $10 a month, not having to worry about it is worth that money.

Install it in a VM. Create snapshots. When you fuck it up then revert the snapshot.

Once you’re decent at figuring out what to and not to do then try to get proficient at file system snapshots so you can do the same thing more or less on bare metal.

And there’s a ton of tools to remove the bloat from regular windows. Honestly the biggest problem with those is they tend to go hog wild and remove too many things so you have to be careful with them and not just blindly click “remove everything possible”.

The major H2 updates do legitimately add a lot of features that people would actually want, that LTSC and IoT don’t get. If you’re mostly playing older games that’s not a problem. But if you’re trying to play games that just recently came out it can be. Windows 10 stopping at 22H2 has kinda put a pause on that, but I’m sure once it goes EOL Microsoft games will resume the “march of progress” and start requiring new features.

I’ll want to make use of a lot of Windows features like virtualization, the ability to run Android apps, and the Linux subsystem.

Just stick with regular windows 11. Windows updates don’t come out that often, and feature updates can be ignored for 6+ months.

No, it’s not allowed. The police are already on the way for thought crimes against updating.

Malware creators?

I had about 300 days of uptime on my server but I did some hardware maintenance recently. I’m back up to like 20 but I need to do more stuff.

I did find a fun “bug” the other day with windows and how it tracks uptime. Since shutting down hibernates the kernel it doesn’t treat it as time off. So when I fired up this surface I hadn’t used in a long time it had 180 days of uptime.