I’ll give a shoutout to the rEFInd boot manager. If anyone has ever had trouble with Grub, rEFInd continues to work for years across multiple machines. I have never had a problem with it.

It is an HP Omnibook 7, model 16T-BH000. Mine is 16", but it also comes in a 14" model called 14T-HG000 with the same 300 series processors if that is your preferred size.

It has an aluminum chassis, and I got mine configured with a 120Hz OLED screen. 70Wh battery on the 16" and 68Wh on the 14", though a 3% difference in battery is probably not enough to be noticeable. The 14" weighs around 1.44kg/3.17 lbs while the 16" weighs 1.96kg/4.32 lbs. I think that is actually a smidge lighter than the Macbooks, but not as light as something like the LG gram or the Asus Expertbook series, though I can’t speak for either of those as I have never owned them.

HP runs sales on their website frequently, so while my configuration normally would have cost around $2200 USD, I got it on sale for around $1600.

Edit: though I guess per your criteria above, yes, it does come with Windows installed and I ended up putting in a second SSD and installing Linux on that. Buying my own SSD was cheaper than upgrading to a 2TB option on their website, and it has two NVMe slots, so now I can dual boot as well. Also bear in mind that in a Macbook, the SSD is soldered to the motherboard and non-removable.

I am a little confused by the reasoning here. Is battery life your only consideration at all? Are there any other criteria which influence your choice?

It seems like a shame to jump ship on an entire ecosystem solely because your current machine has disappointing battery life.

I recently got a machine with the new Intel 358H and the B390 iGPU. I haven’t used it a ton yet, but it seems like it gets around 8-10 hours battery life on normal web browsing/productivity tasks in my experience, and while not as powerful as an RTX 4060 (Most benchmarks place the B390 somewhere between a 3050 and 4050), I imagine would be serviceable for editing and coding.

KDE. I don’t even do much to customize it. I think it looks pretty good out of the box.

That is fair enough. Have there been any findings that CPUs are sending telemetry of some kind, or is it more the idea of there possibly being some back door for governments to use?

I guess for me personally, my threat model for privacy is more towards foiling corporate data harvesting wherever possible, but I have resigned myself to the realization that making a computer nation-state-proof is borderline impossible without unreasonable levels of effort, especially for a normal computer user like myself.

That was my first thought about the IME, but I wasn’t sure. I guess that is what I am trying to understand.

Your best bet is to probably look into a snapdragon laptop. Based on everything I have heard, RISC V is going to be rough going. Some folks have also converted raspberry pis into laptops, but I imagine the build quality will be much more janky than an OEM laptop.

Also, depending on your philosophic outlook, would buying a used laptop count? You are not really supporting the CPU maker or laptop OEM, as you are using hardware which was already sold, and reducing e-waste in the world.

Lastly, I am trying to understand the meaning behind “protect my privacy.” Is there something less private about an AMD or Intel CPU, even if you have Linux installed on it, or is that covered by the Linux part?

As someone out of the loop on this, it would be helpful if they didn’t wait until 4 paragraphs into the article to state what OnlyOffice actually did. Likewise the article they link to by OpenOffice doesn’t state what EuroOffice did until 7 paragraphs in.

Apparently it’s a dispute about EuroOffice changing the logo when they forked OnlyOffice?

In terms of being “safe,” if you mean in terms of data collection/privacy, just because big companies have an interest in Linux, that does not mean your Linux Mint install is sending telemetry back to those big companies with your personal data.

Big companies have an interest in Linux because Linux is the backbone of server infrastructure all over the world. They contribute to the code, but the code is open source, so the community could see if they were putting some kind of telemetry into open source projects, or the community could simply fork the code if a big company tried to do some other objectionable thing.

I am not aware of any guides, but I know that in order to get the terminal to look like Manjaro’s, you will need to install the zsh shell with the powerlevel10k theme and zsh-syntax-highlighting. I believe they also use either zsh-autocomplete or zsh-autosuggestions.

At least, this was how it was configured back when I used Manjaro several years ago.

I prefer tlp, as it gives me more granular control than autocpu-freq, which I have also used. It allows me to retain control over certain things like USB auto-suspend behavior (a problem with some power utilities like powertop), and the audio powerdown on the headphone jack when on battery, but which was causing popping and audio cutting in after a delay whenever I started a video or application with audio.

Also, if a pkgbuild was updated for security reasons, now Manjaro is putting users at risk by continuing to serve the old version

Hold up, isn’t that last point just a criticism of delayed updates in general? By that logic, would Manjaro be putting users at security risk by holding back the main packages?

Interesting. As a former Manjaro user (several years ago now), my problems with the distro were more with their approach to package management and the AUR. They withhold packages for the main repositories, but the dependencies for AUR packages will always assume the latest packages, so I would constantly get into these dependency deadlocks where I could not install or could not update certain AUR packages because the necessary dependencies were the incorrect version. I view this as a fundamental technical problem with their approach, and was my main reason for switching away.

Hopefully the new structure/leadership will result in technical changes which fix their issues. Though if I am being honest, the vision of a Manjaro with rolling packages is basically just a reskinned EndeavourOS, so I am not sure what they would need to do for me to recommend this distro to anyone.

The best way to go into it is to think of it as learning a new skill. Some things are done differently, some things may require a bit more setup the first time you do them, but once you have your system where you like it, it should be possible to use without thinking about it too much.

Printers generally work fine in Linux. This is one area where Linux does surprisingly well.

For all the games, I’m not sure. They may just work with Wine or Proton, but it is far from guaranteed. I have had good results running even quite old games from the late '90s through platforms like GoG, though.

Good news I guess, but at the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, didn’t Intel previously lay off a bunch of their linux and driver devs just last year in July/August?

Sources:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-SLM-Driver-Orphaned

https://www.techradar.com/pro/linux-at-risk-recent-intel-layoffs-are-putting-key-projects-at-risk-experts-warn?pubDate=20250814

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/major-intel-linux-driver-projects-are-dying-due-to-intel-layoffs-and-corporate-restructuring-compatibility-and-reliability-issues-could-increase-over-time

I use plain Arch for desktop, but for servers I use headless debian. A media center is sort of in between, so up to you. In terms of resource usage on an older laptop, I expect the choice of DE would matter more.

Side question: his job is asking him to run work programs on his personal machine? If they are not willing to provide a work laptop or if it is something that does not require powerful hardware to run, I feel like in that situation I would buy a burner laptop off ebay to run the work thing on.

That’s just my personal preference, but I do not mix work and personal things on the same computer.

Privacy concerns for the most part. Also for better desktop performance and less bloat on my existing hardware. I was not going to buy a whole new laptop just for macOS, and also gaming on macOS is not nearly as viable.

I would like to somewhat dispute this idea that all Linux users enjoy fixing problems for entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I can and do solve problems in Linux, but once I have a setup that works, I just use my machine normally rather than constantly tinkering with it.

As for how I went about the switch, fortunately, my laptop at the time had 2 NVMe slots, so I installed a second drive and dual-booted between Windows and Linux for a while until I had set up replacements for all the programs that I use regularly.

I am an electrical engineer, so even beyond Teams and MS Office, several of the engineering and CAD programs we use are not supported or only partially supported on Linux (i.e. hardcoded to only work on a specific version of Ubuntu, lol).

I have spoken to our IT guy, and he would be completely on board with using Linux, but even he acknowledges that there is no reasonable path to us doing so, so I just sort of accept it.

Hello from the owner of a 2018 Gigabyte Aero 15Wv8! Neat to see these less common Gigabyte laptops being used with Linux.

That UEFI looks a lot newer than the one on my machine, so I am not 100% sure, but I would assume disabling “enforce secure boot” would be the same as disabling secure boot. Other folks may know more, but I cannot think of any reason why turning it off would brick your Linux install.

As for XFCE vs KDE, I would say stick with KDE/Wayland unless you can really not find any workaround. The difference in resource usage between DEs is probably not significant enough that it would make a difference on a machine with 16GB of RAM and a relatively recent CPU. I mostly see that advice given for older machines with very little RAM.

I’m not sure about that game or the gradual lag issue. A quick google shows someone describing a similar-sounding issue in this Linux Mint forum thread, though. Maybe some of the suggestions there might help? They mention some stuff around LD_PRELOAD= with various parameters in Proton.