Sampling variation/statistical noise, probably. I wouldn’t read too far into it.

I think it cuts both ways. A lead dev of the PS5 Linux effort recently quit over the number of AI-assisted “security researchers” trying to make a quick buck on bug bounties rather than contribute to open source efforts.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/09/ps5-linux-dev-quits-after-the-only-hypervisor-bug-left-was-reported-to-sony/

I feel like, as you already mentioned, a headless arch install sounds the closest to what you want.

I’m not sure why you need to write your own install script. What’s wrong with the normal Arch install script? I’ve never used it myself, actually.

When I first installed arch, I wrote down each step in the tutorial video I watched into a set of discrete steps. I now have that .odt saved and can pull it up again whenever needed, so reinstalling arch isn’t as daunting as it was for me originally, but I still have the flexibility of doing everything manually and understanding why I am doing each step.

For something like a USB-C to C or USB-C to A, If you have something like an external M.2 SSD with a USB C connector and a fast enough port on your PC, you could see how fast a large file transfers. For USB C to C, most things I think should be USB 3.0 or higher, and you can tell whether some USB As are USB 2.X or USB 3.X by looking down the end and seeing whether it has that smaller fifth pin in the back. The color of the plastic tab in the USB can sometimes be an indicator, albeit an unreliable one as manufacturers are always screwing around with the colors. Blue usually means USB 3.X, black sometimes means USB 2.X, and white sometimes means USB 1.X. Any other color like orange is more likely to mean USB 3 than not, but not necessarily.

For USB A to Micro USB, I am fairly certain those will be USB 2.X. I am not aware of any micro USB device which operated at USB 3.X speeds. The only thing to watch out for are cheap cables with only power and ground populated and no data lines. But the easy way to test that is to just see whether a device is detected and identified at all by your PC through the cable, as that means the data lines are populated.

HDMI, I’m less sure, but if you have a high resolution/refresh rate monitor, you could try connecting it between the PC and the monitor and see what resolution/refresh rate options are listed, or seeing if there are visual artifacts or noise at the highest settings.

Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as “a refurb” and assumed you had bought something refurbished.

Side question: you bought a laptop but don’t know what specs it has? How did that happen?

That’s good to know. Thanks!

Yeah, that’s fair. It definitely depends on the model and the product tier. All the manufacturers, even Lenovo’s lower end/consumer models, can have poor build quality on some models, so I would avoid those. Your average mid-tier and up business laptop will probably hold up just fine, though.

At some level it may also be luck of the draw, even if build quality will help the odds. Sometimes even a high-end laptop can get dropped once at the wrong angle and stop working, and yet I have seen beat-up chromebooks which looked like they came from a warzone and yet somehow still run.

Sure, there is certainly nothing wrong with a T480, and if you can find them at a reasonable price then go for it. That said, I would not exclude any other brands out of hand if you can find a good deal on, say, a 3-5 year old business laptop from the likes of Dell or HP. For all the durability of a T480, bear in mind that it will already be ~8 years old when you get it.

I think historically Linux users had to be a bit more particular about laptop models due to spotty driver support on laptop hardware, hence the love for Thinkpads which had good Linux compatibility, but these days I think the only real compatibility concerns are around fingerprint sensors with proprietary drivers and the occasional oddball wifi chip.

Upgrading BIOS is also a concern as @PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world mentioned, but in some cases I have used a bootable Windows USB drive to run the .exe-based FW upgrades on my HP laptop, for example.

I don’t think you need to limit yourself to a Thinkpad specifically. Linux should work on almost any laptop these days. I would look around for secondhand business laptops. They tend to be reasonably priced and often gently used when they are coming from business environments.

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.