yeah, those are too big. was hoping to score an ITX-sized abandonware for cheap and retrofit it with a 10 TB or so drive. I had this thing many moons ago:
it could fit a drive, with some wiggling and swearing. so I figured maybe something similar exists. building it from new parts is way, way out of budget.
edit: this is how it ran for close to a year.
Wrongest community ever to post this in?
I have a ton of the bottom three laptops, wanna trade for the shitty one up top?
My thinkpad is also light in the connectivity area and I absolutely adore the $30 dock I got for it. Click the laptop in place and LAN, displays, audio, power, keyboard, mouse, external storage are connected instantly; if I had to connect each one separately, multiple times per day, I’d go insane.
here’s a combo reply that doesn’t need to be there, but people have issues reading titles, I don’t know…
first off, do you realize where we’re at? normies don’t frequent lemmy, you have to put in considerable effort to find it and interact with it. your average lemmyst’s tech expertise is way, way above the average user, compared to say reddit or, heaven forbid, facebook or such.
I’m not answering dudes (no gender inferred) who are like “X years linuxing”. have you read the title of the post? can you deduce who it’s directed at? you’re seriously suggesting endeavor and arch and friends to people who’ve opened the command prompt a total times of never and don’t understand what regedit is/was for?
this is a post directed towards people transitioning from windows and macOS. people who have issues comprehending bootloaders and kernels and DEs, WMs, etc - and frankly, it’s 2024 and they don’t need to. people who close the laptop when they’re done and open 'em in the morning, basically people who don’t do a lot of sysadmining in their daily lives.
when was the last time you handed over a laptop with a fresh install to a linux illiterate being? I did so three times this week, and that’s below average; can’t get cheap SSDs right now to upgrade the the discards we get. my point is, I know what they come back with in terms of problems and grievances and none of them include “spending more time tweaking xorg.conf” or “learning systemd”. they have issues printing and sharing files and laptops sleeping/waking when they’re supposed to and counter-intuitive touchpad gestures and the like.
I’ve also had my share of devs trying to convert their issued laptops with fully functioning installs to this weird rice after reading DHH’s blog and the amount of lost time and productivity spent undoing that crap is staggering.
linux has this problem of experienced users raining downright useless and often counterproductive advice on noobs. the shit that works for you doesn’t work for them and you know that; the same way a racing car driver’s advice is useless in everyday traffic
this is not a “which distro is better”, this is which is appropriate for a noob. you want something that has a lot of attention devoted to preventing issues and that when you search “distro + problem” you get a solution, or close to it. it’s way more likely you’ll succeed with ubuntu than with opensuse.
once you’re an intermediate user and don’t need the kiddie wheels no more, you’re free to wander further, replace DEs, rice, switch distros, whatevers. but a noob will have his hands full with the transition and doesn’t need the extra baggage.
a user doesn’t discern user-facing and system apps, to them it’s a notification asking for a “software update” and that shit pops up daily. the mess that’s Gnome software, a horrid creation that’s OOB configured to prompt for reboots for every tiny little thing, because it updates system shit along with apps, is the number one complaint generator for converts; they’re used to a couple of those per annum (macOS) or per month (windows).
flatpak apps settings are in ~/.var/app and as such easy to include into backups.
I can’t tell if you’re serious, but if so - you’re the literal opposite of a noob transitioning and making their first steps. if you’re like any of the things you mentioned - arch, nvidia, xfce, let alone all of them combined - is something a noob should even entertain of doing, then I don’t know what to tell you.
the post is aimed at people a) transitioning and subsequently b) doing actual work, based on a bunch of people I’ve converted over. the input of dudes like you, while welcome, is in no way indicative of the path they should be taking.
they are widely available and cheap.