This thumbnail hurts to look at.

Is this installing a local .deb file or installing from a repo? If installing from a repo, the .deb and the full file path are unnecessary. If you’re installing a downloaded file, use dpkg -i package.deb not apt.

The barrier for me is that I use a lot of apps which require native messaging for inter-program communication (keepass browser, citation managers talking to Libreoffice, etc.), and the portal hasn’t been implemented yet. Its been stuck in PR comment hell for years. Looks like its getting close, but flatpak-only is a hard no go for me until then.

Even after that, I would worry about doing some Dev work on atomic distros, and I worry about running into other hard barriers in the future.

Designed in the US, fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan. TSMC is opening some n-1 fabs in Arizona soon so some could be fabbed in the US in the future.

Obsidian is not FOSS, but you can switch to it for now because the whole idea is that it’s just a folder of markdown files. I recommend shopping around by pointing each app at the same markdown folder, so you can see your same notes without having to worry about complex migration. Being able to look at all your notes gives you a better idea of what will suit you.

Also, I recommend Pandoc for translating between document formats. It’s not not absolutely perfect, but it is wildly good at dealing with the complex problem of translating.

The simplest thing you can use, IMO, is Marktext. It’s basically Notepad for markdown – no file manager, no special features on top of the markdown syntax, etc. Beyond that you start getting into what features you want on top, at which point you really do just have to test them out for your use case.

As far as options go, you have basically two options as far as systems go:

• A built-in sync in the program between the desktop and phone version of the same app (i.e. obsidian, Joplin)
• Use a tool like syncthing for sync between devices, which allows you to use any app you want for actual note-taking, and allows you to use different apps on phone vs. desktop. I do the latter, and use Zettlr on desktop (more document than note-centric) and Markor on android. The issue with the former is that a great desktop app might not have the best phone version. Also, the apps that do sync typically use an internal database that you can export as a folder of markdown files (i.e. Joplin), and don’t actually just look at a folder of files. This makes testing out different editors kinda hard, unfortunately.

The other wierd variable is that some apps are literally just a WYSIWYG markdown editor (Marktext, etc.), whereas most of them are markdown editors with Other Stuff On Top™ (Obsidian, Zettlr, LogSeq, etc.). Not all apps implement the same flavor of markdown (which can be maddening, but you can use pandoc to change markdown flavor), but if you rely on a specific app’s special flavor of garnish on top of markdown, it becomes harder to switch to another app in the future if you prefer its functionality or UI. Just something to keep in mind.

For me personally, one of the make or break traits is a good table creator. Making tables by hand in Markdown is a maddening, so having a GUI way to do it makes a huge difference if you end up needing to make a lot of tables. That is really hard to find because it is hard to automate Markdown table formatting in a foolproof way. As far as I know, the table plugin in Obsidian is the best way to do that by far at the moment. The Zettlr devs are working hard on rewriting theirs from scratch to be way more robust, but that is WIP.

tl;dr Just pick a Markdown editor, and you can shop from there as long as they store their files in a simple folder.

+1 for Mint

Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.

Thats via fwupd, thinkpads specifically get this because Lenovo officially supports Ubuntu on them. Other lenovo laptops don’t get this!

I have an AMD 5900HS iGPU and a 3070M in my laptop. I’ve had no issues on Mint (with the auto-installed Optimus in the Nvidia Prime applet) or with PopOS. If you want to use passthrough, SR-IOV GPU sharing is not an option for AMD iGPUs IIRC, and I know it doesn’t work for NVIDIA dGPUs, so you’d need to pass the whole dGPU through to the Windows VM to get hardware acceleration.

For Figma, I would say the unofficial Electron wrapper or the online version is likely your best bet in terms of reliability. If it’s just using the browser mechanisms for hwaccel (no funky accessing windows resources behind the scenes) if you run Optimus in the “on-demand” mode the webpage should be able to access the dgpu for hardware acceleration just fine. Optimus is a lot better than it was a few years ago.

By default, when your HDD cannot be mounted as writeable, it mounts as read-only instead. If you used Windows before, the Windows hibernate and fast boot functions can basically “reserve” the partition, causing it to only be writeable as read only. If you have windows still installed, is it possible that it booted into Windows to do an update or you’ve booted into it since? If so, I’d recommend disabling fast boot in Windows.

If there’s no Windows still installed on your system, I would reccomend changing the mount options on the hdd to: nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,rw,exec. You can change these directly by editing /etc/fstab, but I would recommend against editing the fstab table manually – if you edit the wrong entry, it can prevent your system from booting. I’ve not had good luck with the KDE partition manager, but if you install gparted and right click on the partition it should give you options to change the mount options, and you can add the options above there.

FYI, mount options are read left to right by the system, so if you really want rw (read/write) and exec to be true and not overriden by other mount options, put them at the end of the mount option line.

Oh, how the turn tables…

My understanding is the big change here is that they’re specifically making it available to other handheld manufacturers, which is huge, because windows handhelds have not been great because of how much the bloat of Windows steals performance and battery life. They’re making steps to make SteamOS (I.e. Linux in general) the default OS for handhelds and non-console dedicated gaming machines in general.

If it works, it will put tremendous pressure on publishers to support linux, which is great.

Yeah, choosing Arch as the base of something that’s supposed to be newbie-friendly and stable is wild, but it seems to have been working so far.

To be fair, that was in their own financial best interest. Since arbitrations are charged a fee per customer someone figured out that you can do an effective “class action” against valve by having many people submit the same arbitration claim against valve and costing them so much through the arbitration fees that it it was almost impossible for them to cone out on top regardless of the outcome of the arbitration (iirc).

They changed to allowing lawsuits because they can request those to be merged, and therefore its cost-effective for them to fight them.

And you saw how that turned out for them…😂

Do you mean a dedicated gaming flavor of Linux? Because otherwise, isn’t that just a console?

Have you tried configuring the amd-pstate driver in GRUB? That helped me a fair bit with battery life, though having an ROG laptop also meant I was already using asusd, which tripled my battery life just by having reasonable fan and power level settings. I hadn’t had any luck with TLP either.

Mint is meant for “just works” setups especially for folks new to Linux. Never had an issue.

A couple added notes after rereading your post:

• Linux shouldn’t care about the specific laptop, you might want to try searching for the 365 SOC instead, that ought to give you more info.
• Strix Point should give you substantially better compute power and efficiency than the 8000 series, so you can have your cake and eat it too.
• on a reliability note, I recommended a Yoga to a friend a couple years ago, and within a year the hinge broke and shattered the screen. She now has a thinkpad, which is a lot more durable.

The zen 5 chip should work fine if you’re on kernel 6.8+ (which is when zen5 IDs were introduced), but you might have some poor battery life. Here are some testimonials from folks who ran 6.11 on it and it performed well.

The note about enabling the amd_pstate driver was interesting, evidently it was not default in my system! The “guided” mode seems great.