Been using KDE 6 on this device since last year without issue. The power profiles are present in the system tray and slider in the quick menu, so whatever that issue it’s been fixed. I’ve been using Nobara and OpenSuSE but maybe it’s an issue on LTS releases if they’re on a point release where this was an issue?
The power setting is a very good shout though - KDE defaulted to Balanced setting for me and I needed to change to Performance to get good gaming experiences.
As far as I’m aware they all do. It’s frustrating but I wouldn’t let it stop you buying these. Microsoft has aggressive deals with OEMs, and it’s pretty hard for manufacturers to avoid Windows due to it’s dominance. But OEMs have big discount deals on licenses so in terms of the portion of your purchase that goes to Microsoft it should be small. I look at it as cutting into the profits of the OEM because I was happy with the devices price even if it’d come with no OS.
I immediately wiped Win11 off my PC and installed Linux.
I have the same device and have had no issues with drivers or games. I also wiped Win 11 and have Linux on there.
I started with Nobara and it worked immediately and been running with that for nearly 18 months. I have recently (as in this week) switched to OpenSuSE after my Nobara install had issues, and again gaming is fine.
I’m not sure about Mint or Kubuntu but I can’t see why either would have issues. The drivers should be within the kernel; I haven’t needed separate drivers. I used KDE on both Nobara and on OpenSUSE without issue.
As you’ve experienced, I been impressed with the level the graphics can get to. Largely medium settings at 1080p for many games. I have played Cyberpunk 2077 on this on a mix of low to medium settings.
This may be too basic question but you’re not playing games at 4k are you? The desktop can be at 4k but the games need to be set to less. You should be able to play 3D games on it, and I’d expect Yakuza Zero to play fine. The device is good with a 4k desktop and 4k video, but 4k 3D games is way more of an ask and you need to bring games down to 1080 (or even 720p if you want to push up some of the other game options).
EDIT: BTW if you have a gaming desktop you can stream games to this miniPC in 4k. I switched to playing Cyperpunk via steam streaming and it looked incredible.
EDIT2: One thing that is generally important is to install gstreamer and available codecs. They categorise them as “Good”, “Bad” and “Ugly”. Often the “good” category codecs are installed but sometimes the more proprietary codes in the “ugly” category are not (they are “Ugly” due to their licenses but are still excellent quality). I don’t believe it makes a difference to gaming but I certainly noticed issues with video. OpenSuSE doesn’t install proprietary codecs by default. Nobara did (I think) but I’m not sure about Mint and Kubuntu’s approachs.
EDIT 3: Just wanted to highlight another important point mentioned elsewhere in this thread by [email protected]. KDE defaults to balanced power mode for me and that certainly does impact the GPU performance. You need to change it to Performance mode in the power settings. That can either be done from the “Power and Battery” area in the task tray or in the “Power Management” section of the KDE Settings app (near the bottom of the list in the “System” group).
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?
It’s the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it’ll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?
That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world
There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it’s hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.
You can of course create a dedicated “private” email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you’re worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it’s own silo separate from other personal emails.
Yeah I totally understand that, I’ve played around with immutable distros inside virtual machines and they’re interesting. Also if you like tinkering, Linux is a great OS.
If you do go immutable have a play with KVM - Kernel Virtual Machines - they’re easy to set up and give near native speeds for guest virtual Linux machines (or decent performance for other OS like Windows) It’s a great way to play with Linux inside a sandbox while keeping your host clear; but also a very useful way to run custom software in a flexible Linux guest while on an immutable desktop. E.g. Create a Mint VM to run something that’d be a pain to set up on Silverblue.
Immutable desktop plus KVM guests might be the best of both worlds. Even if you don’t end up on immutable distro, KVM is cool tech that has really advanced in the last few years. It’s better and more powerful than VirtualBox imo, and I use it a lot even on my rolling release distro (I have a VM to run work Microsoft Office, plus a few Linux VMs for a torrent stack and just for tinkering).
So I’m a sceptic when it comes to immutable desktops. What you gain in stability you sacrifice in flexibility and control. If you want to use software outside of Flatpak and your distros repos, immutable can be very annoying to work around.
If you want more control and flexibility, a standard install with a Long Term Support distro will be fine. I use OpenSuSE Tumbleweed; I wouldn’t recommend that as it’s a rolling distro but I would recommend OpenSuSE Leap the point release distro. It has good user tools in YaST, it’s secure and it’s reliable, and it has a sensible update schedule. It is also a decent distro for coding. It has multiple versions of Python available which I believe are configured to coexist well, deliberately to make coding and version control easier.
I’d avoid anything directly Ubuntu related due to the reliance on Snap. But Linux Mint is a good variant which has loads of support available online if you want to ease back into Linux. Make no mistake, although it’s user friendly, it’s a full distro and capable of being as powerful as you want.
If you really do want to go down the immutable route, then probably Fedora Silver blue and variants is the way to go at the moment. I second the Kaionite recommendation - KDE is great. It’s well established and popular in the space, so there will more support out there should issues arise (most commonly installing something not in the repos and not on Flatpak). Immutable distros from other big names aren’t really there yet in terms of the user base as far as I’m aware.
The cost difference may reflect the performance difference.
I’m assuming you meant the RX 9060 XT? It is significantly more powerful than the B580.
I’d say the AMD card is the better purchase - it’s more powerful and the drivers are well established with lots of support online for solving issues with specific games with Proton. Most of the time things just work but to be using a card and platform that is widely used makes life easier.
It’s great Intel are supporting Linux and there is more competition in the graphics market, but I personally wouldn’t suggest being a pioneer buying their cards. You’re already doing something a bit unusual by gaming on Linux (even if it’s growing rapidly). I wouldn’t throw a new relatively niche card into the mix for now. It’d probably be fine but I’d stump up the extra cash for a better card that might last you a few years longer for AAA games.
Yeah all you have to do is circumvent the security settings in your browser and suppress warning messages to enable Manifest 2, all in 8 easy steps (written as if it’s 6 steps to make it seem less onerous). For now. Until Google switches it off completely.
Or, drop Chrome and Chromium based browsers (such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc) in one easy step. Install a privacy respecting Firefox based browser like Firefox itself or Librewolf.
Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. The fork Strawberry is a safer bet; actively maintained.
Elisa is a modern music player from the KDE project. It’s quite slick but not always the most intuitive - some options are hidden away in menus to keep the main interface slick.
It definitely has Repeat One.
Otherwise Strawberry is probably the best bet. It’s not the slickest looking in terms of modern UI design but it’s rock solid and still actively maintained. It’s basically the continuation of Clementine (which is largely untouched since 2016) which itself was a continuation of Amarok.
I like Strawberry but I do find the UI a bit jarring in the modern era. It’s feature rich and stable though.
And yet we’ve had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.
We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.
Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a “success” for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.
Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.
It’s very difficult to get explosives and it’s very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.
Listen: the world is not as bad as news media and social media make out. People love wallowing in misery - don’t let them bring you down.
In many ways we are living in a golden age - technology has never been so advanced, you have at your fingers more power, knowledge and freedom than any generation before has ever had. And despite all the gloom and doom, renewable energy is exploding electric cars are everywhere, people are living longer and healthier, poverty is down across the world and falling. Good news doesn’t cut through on social media or news. Seek it out - it’s all around you.
The world is far from perfect but it’s also no where near as bad as it sometimes seems. The world has always been in a state of flux and changing. We lived through a brief period of stability after the fall of the Berlin wall but normal service has resumed. Somethings will get better, some things will get worse. Sometimes good politicians will be in power sometimes bad.
Trust me as someone now in their 40s, you will look back and wonder why you wasted time worrying about things that ended up not smattering. When I was 20 it was all about George W Bush dooming the world and America. It wasn’t about the positive things that actually happened - like the mobile phone, the internet, falling poverty, rising living standards around the world, the solar panels, and wind turbines and electric cars, and so much more. I work.on Healthcare - diseases I learned were death sentences like cancer or even diabetes and HIV are now treatable and some even curable. Others realistically look they will be cured in my lifetime. When I was 20 those possibilities were all dismissed as wishful thinking, and the main worry was narrow stuff about a politician you probably barely know about and a war people don’t care about anymore.
And now - the world has moved on and now everyone is agnosing over Donald Trump. We’re still worrying about climate change but we’re still not talking about the global renewable energy revolution.
The last 20 years have been nothing short of miraculous in many ways, yet you’d think from social media and mainstream news that the Human race is already extinct and we’re just waiting for the lights to go out. Fuck that. Ignore the shit, get out and live your life. The world is amazing. Go out and see it.
Mate, you need to switch off from it.
Take it from someone older - the news is always bad, the world is always in trouble, whatever is happening today is supposedly always terrible and it can seemingly only get worse. A lot of it is actually total rubbish and nonsense and you need to tune it out. News and social media grab your attention by trying to be shocking and proactive - and they do it largely for money.
Put things in perspective a bit. We are living in the most technologically advanced time in human history. People are living longer and healthier. Cutting edge medicine is allowing more and more people to survive from cancer. Renewable energy is growing at record rates, and electric cars are booming - things we were told only 10 years ago wasn’t going to happen and we’d all be doomed.
And when it comes to Trump - remember he has been president before. The world didn’t end and it won’t this time. Politicians are being politicians and there is fuck all you can do about it so tune it out.
When I was in my 20s it was all about how evil George W Bush was and how he was destroying America and so on. Trumps a shit but the older you get the more you’ll realise how much a lot of the talk is hyperbole and exaggeration. After Bush came Obama. After Trump someone else will come and you can have your say in the mid term elections in a year and presidential elections in 3 years. In the meantime, forget about it and live you life.
Get away from social media, get away from political news and websites. It’s just going to make you feel anxious about things you have no control over and a relentless negative message. The most you need do is vote when the next election comes around, and maybe donate to causes you believe in when you can afford it. Anything else has to come from within and if it’s not there then is not worth wasting your time on it. Live your life and ignore the shitshow. Be a decent person and treat people with kindness and fairness. That is all we can expect of anyone.
The world is not as bad as social media and the news makes it out to be. You’re in part experiencing catastrophe fatigue - the constant negative bombardment of news and opinion that tries to grab your attention by being dramatic and negative. So cut it out.
As for your girlfriend be honest with her and how what she is sharing is impacting you both negatively. If she can’t stop then maybe it’s time to move on.
There is so much more to life than worrying about an 80 year old fat orange man.
Yeah… Except he makes the “freak kid” live under the stairs and neglects him compared to his own son. Kinda hard to redeem the guy by him being otherwise average.
Yeah I wouldn’t worry about Steam, it’ll work.
The most important thing is your graphics drivers and they’re largely the same between distros. Even with non rolling distros usually there are ways to stay with the latest drivers if that’s needed.
For Minecraft, best route is Java edition. There is an official Microsoft installer for Java, and If they’re into modded Minecraft then MultiMC is a better Linux launcher than the Microsoft one as it makes modding much easier; they just need to login to their Microsoft account within it to get going.
You can get Bedrock to work if that’s essential but it is unofficial and definitely needs a special launcher and a little bit faffy to set up. But it works.
All the stuff that gaming distros offer like optimised kernels really is marginal stuff. Definitely keep it simple; it’ll make your life much easier supporting it all and it will give your friend/family member a good stable experience so they can just focus on having fun.
Personally I’d say none of the above for newbies. I have had experience with Nobara and it’s OK but I literally had problems with GPG certificates for updates for the second time in 3 months, and yesterday the update engine crashed during an update and my plasma desktop only showed a black screen with a cursor on it when I logged in.
I can problem solve that but it’s annoying as hell and not suitable for someone who doesn’t want to do that.
Pick a more mainstream distro and not something that is rolling release. They don’t need that - they need something that is rock solid. The gaming modifications on distros are overrated - they only matter if you really want to push things to the limit.
I’d probably go with Mint for your scenario. It’s stable, and the 22.1 is a long term release up to 2029 - so it’s unlikely to break with a major update.
I’d personally go with KDE over cinnamon - it’s user friendly but its slicker than the default desktops in Mint and will make the machine feel more high end as a gaming machine. There is also scope to customise it if the person using that wants to go down that route or has something they’re already familiar with (KDE very flexible - feels like a nicer version of windows GUI by default but can make it look like MacOS or even Gnome, or whatever you want tbh). Cinnamon and Mate have flexibility too but KDE has a whole ecosystem of software to draw on and doesn’t suffer from Gnomes rather marmite design philosophy.
In terms of games - use Steam where possible. It’ll “just work”. There is almost no configuration required and personally I have a huge games library and haven’t had to troubleshoot anything so far. I don’t play competitive games or the highest end fps games though. But I’ve just completed cyberpunk 2077 on my desktop, which is a 3070 and had no issues.
Some popular games like Minecraft have their own clients and set up but it’s not difficult to set up once and leave it going.
Lutris is a good games client if they do have games in other stores like GOG or Epic, and it works well with steam too. Heroic is also a good multi store client - slick and easy to use if that’s preferred, good for gog, Epic and amazon.
Whatever you chose to do, keep.ot simple. I’d honestly avoid the gaming distros and go for something stable and widely support like Mint. Definitely avoid pure Ubuntu, and avoid rolling releases of anything and you should be fine support wise.
True. Bit of a tangent but one issue when you have free Healthcare the cost of smoking to individuals is lower. Genuinely it’s a problem - sometimes people don’t value their health as much as they should because of ease of access to Healthcare. I’m 1000% in favour of free Healthcare, it’s just an interesting paradox.
Public health measures focusing on increasing the cost of smoking through tax work but we don’t have the pressure to stop smoking due to the cost of Healthcare itself which can make it harder to get people to understand the effects. Meanwhile public organisations understand the cost of smoking and invest in trying to reduce it as it puts huge pressure on Healthcare systems. Not just cancer but it’s a major driver of cardiovascular disease (heart attacks, peripheral vascular disease) and lung diseases (emphysema / COPD). The costs of smoking related diseases is staggering.
Smoking is in decline across the west but we’ve known since the 1940s and 1950s definitely that smoking is bad yet smoking rates have been persistently high in Europe until more recently - last 20 years or so.
Smoking rates in France for example - 23% still smoke but there has been a huge decline in the last 20 years. Yet smoking was banned on public transport in the 1970s. To be clear I’m not saying it’s because of free Healthcare - just that in countries with good Healthcare systems there is more going on. People have known for 80 years smoking is bad and there has been a gradual decline but big shifts have happened surprisingly recently.
Edit: maybe this is a bit ott comment for a meme lol
I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.
Only caution on this is KDE has had significant improvements in each of it’s point releases. Trixie is looking to launch with KDE 6.3.5 but latest is now 6.4.
It’s always a balance between stability and latest release, but KDE has had quite rapid improvement as it’s still early in the 6 era. Having said that the it does feel like the changes now coming through are mainly polish and new features rather than fixing fundamental issues - so 6.3.5 might be a good base for Debian Trixie.