How old is your laptop? Pretty much every Windows machine I’ve ever owned after a certain year requires you to type in your Bitlocker key, including my first-gen Surface Go from 2018.

Also, you often have to manually set up encryption on most Linux installs as well - I did it for my Thinkpad. I need to do it for my desktop as well - I should probably do a reinstall, but I’m thinking of backing everything up and trying to do it in-place just for fun. On top of that, we can finally transition to btrfs.

I do use that sometimes. I was able to use it to look at similar laptop models to my Thinkpad to inform my purchase. I then uploaded a probe when I got my hands on it.

I see the need for posts with recommendations in some ways, though - neither the main site or the forum are the easiest to parse, and it doesn’t have every computer model. It is nice to have a human to guide you - it just isn’t so nice when the community starts to get cluttered with these requests.

Honestly part of it is some of these people just don’t do online research, and they might not read the community rules anyway, but it would be nice if we had an explicit rule that hardware recommendations either go to the annual post or be for very oddly specific needs.

I have been using Debian - it’s the only distro I’ve used in my 3 years of Linux as a daily driver, and I started using it in VMs instead of Ubuntu a while before that.

I also like stability and Debian’s community-oriented nature.

I am currently on Testing for my desktop, but plan to either go stable or do a reinstall when Trixie hits stable - I’m tired of rolling release and my programs changing frequently. I have really enjoyed Debian 12 + Flatpaks on my Thinkpad, so I think I will do that when summer rolls around.

Oh certainly. OP is probably doing something wrong. This was just a good excuse to vent about real problems with GTK.

On another note, I sometimes get tired of “Please recommend a good laptop” posts - they’re always just the same old advice: “I liked my Framework” or “Get a Thinkpad”.

I kind of wonder if we could just have an annual mega-post for Linux hardware that gets pinned and mentioned in the server links. For example, “(Pinned) Linux Hardware 2025”. Then we have a rule that you don’t do hardware recommendation posts unless it’s something extremely oddly specific, like “Best Linux hardware for a Pentium II build” or maybe even a question about people’s experiences with VFIO on recent motherboard.

I mean, this might be a bit more your fault in this case, but I agree with the sentiment.

They’re always changing something about the CSS sheets, and I find it a pain to develop for, granted it’s been a few years since I last touched it, and on a very hobbyist level at that. I quickly switched to Qt for that project. Now I use wxWidgets, which I guess just uses GTK, but I like that I don’t have to directly deal with GTK.

Fiddle with OpenRGB and see if it works. If it doesn’t, check if there’s any open issues for your model of card - you might be able to aid testing, and if you’re likely, someone might have already made a branch that hasn’t been merged yet. That was the case with my keyboard.

Googling it, some might also have support for using hooking to the motherboard RGB header instead of internal controls.

I use the Chicago95 XFCE theme, which modifies the bash prompt.

C:\home\dexcube\Development\piper\build> python3
Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar 13 2025, 14:29:07) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from decimal import Decimal
>>> Decimal('0.1') + Decimal('0.2')
Decimal('0.3')

Tried that already.

Based on the report, this seems to be an actual bug - it was working fine for everyone before the update and only happens in the presence of FluidSynth.

Ubuntu probably hasn’t had this version of PipeWire yet.

My work around is working just fine for now, though.

I’ve done it with ffmpeg before - I think the command’s on the Arch wiki. I preserved subtitles as well. I overall remember it being pretty reasonable since I didn’t set it up to re-encode, just pass through original video.

I’ve been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 1st gen AMD on Debian 12. You do have to run a newer kernel to get it working. I ran into a bit of Wi-Fi trouble because I accidentally got a Realtek model, but I’ve long since fixed the issue entirely - I’ve posted the solution elsewhere here.

On another note, maybe we should just have a yearly hardware recommendations post pinned on this forum - it feels like we get a question like this every week or so and they sort of clutter the forum, no offense intended to OP.

Edit: Here’s my Linux Hardware probe from when I first got the laptop https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50fb1862

Borg Backup, whenever I feel like it - usually monthly.

On an unrelated note:

Why do you have Teddy Ruxpin as your desktop background, and more importantly, why do I feel such reverence for it as a very non-stereotypical background for a Linux user?

I use Debian with XFCE, but while I love XFCE, it might not be everyone’s thing. If you do give it a try, make sure to use Whisker Menu instead of the default app menu, and also set keyboard mappings to your liking.

P.S: Ubuntu’s pushing for Snaps, not Flatpaks. Flatpaks are actually pretty good - makes it really easy to install a newer software version when the one in Debian repos doesn’t suffice.

Also, it’s not only Ubuntu pushing for Wayland - most distros or DEs either have it working or are working towards it (there are some exceptions). XFCE is still on xorg, but working on Wayland. The problem is xorg is on life support and not getting a lot of new features.

I’ve had a very good experience with a similarly-speced AMD E16 gen 1.

The only issue I’d warn you about is the Wi-Fi modem might be a Realtek on some models. Mine came with one, and while on recent kernels, it mostly worked well out of the box, it had one issue: something went weird with ACPI when I switched between certain networks, which caused the card to crash and completely disconnect to the system unless I rebooted. I was able to find a fix by changing some options with modprobe.d, which I detail here: https://startrek.website/post/14342770 . Since that, it’s been an extremely smooth experience.

Same. I love my E16 Gen 1.

For battery life, I’d recommend you install CoreCtrl so you can adjust your power settings. That, combined with a few other things (I think the Arch Wiki covers most of them) allows me to get quite a lot out of my Thinkpad in Debian.

Why do we even bother with data at all? Let’s just not exist - humans greatly increase attack surface.

Apple should experience bij.