Thanks, I’m running Bazzite on a (gaming) laptop now, but I’ll install Aurora next time I set up a laptop

I was about to say Bazzite. But Aurora seems to do the same thing? Fedora UniversalBlue based atomic image, with KDE and a sprinkling of of handy out-of-the-box stuff like proprietary codecs, Nvidia drivers etc

Any idea where these hundreds of unused Docker volumes came from?

Yes, this happens automatically for me when I launch games. I don’t remember doing anything special to set it up (Kubuntu with nVidia drivers on X11). I do mostly game in true full screen though, not “full screened window”

Amazing project, well done HeavyBell!

I’ve had a WD Blue SSD completely die in the past, but that could be coincidental. Then again I now have a WD Black nvme where the SMART error counter trickles upwards, so thanks for reminding me I need to change it xD

I’ve also had a Kingston SSD fail on writes, and a Samsung SSD where the error counter trickles upwards, so it might just be coincidental. I’ve also encountered a batch of very expensive Intel SSDs dying early due to a firmware bug, so… TLDR: WD Blue is probably fine :P

Regarding TimeShift, I’m assuming you’ve specified what it should back up, and where. By default it only backs up system files, basically everything outside your /home folder. And stores it on the root partition. That setup is great for recovering from bad system updates, but useless to protect against drive failure.

Assuming you have specified TimeShift to backup your home folder, to a separate physical drive, then twice per day sounds fine. Daily would probably also be fine. Just ask yourself how catastrophic would it really be to loose 1 day of changes?

Oops, sorry, I meant ‘dmesg --follow’ (or ‘dmesg -w’ )

Normally the dmesg kernel log will be quiet after boot, and only give new messages when there’s hardware related changes, like pluging in or out a USB device, or the charger cable.

In my case the log was spamming several messages every second non-stop so it was very obvious

Great 😃 Although… $40 for 1TB nvme sounds suspiciously cheap. Hopefully it’s just cheap cause of the clearance sale. Make sure you do regular backups. TimeShift is good for backing up the operation system, but find something to back up your user-data as well.

I’ve found with cheap SSDs one way they fail is to fail on writes, leading Linux to remount the filesystem as Read-only.

I also had the same thing, don’t worry too much about it.

One thing is worth checking though, which happened on my laptop: After your computer is booted up normally, open a terminal and run dmesg. Is it still spamming these errors?

What happened with mine was that it was still spamming these errors and writing them to the log file(both the log file and the journald database), causing unnecessary wear on the SSD. I filtered out the logs to the file (don’t remember how, but can probably find it again), but couldn’t find how to filter out the logs to the Journald journal.

In my case the spamming was triggered / stopped by unplugging/plugging in the charging cable. If you run ‘dmesg --wall’ it will keep showing you the latest kernel-messages untill you abort with Ctrl+C

Like Synapse also said, your computer is plenty powerful and modern by Linux standards.

Stay away from lightweight desktop environments like Mate and XFCE. They are perfectly OK, but not necessary unless your hardware is really old like 10++ years. You dont have to limit yourself to just “OK”

Mint Edge is for new (last 1-2 years) hardware that is not compatible with Mint (which is based on the Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu, which are released every two years). I saw some news that in the future Mint will not have a separate Edge version, and just make all versions the Edge version, so don’t worry too much about.

One little caveat though, 256GB SSD isn’t all that much these days. For most stuff it’ll be fine, but you should probably avoid installing Flatpaks as they can be quite space-hungry. Native Mint (Ubuntu) packages are usually good enough, just know that most apps will be old, since they’re only updated every two years when there’s a new version of Mint (and Ubuntu LTS). If you buy a bigger SSD just forget about this last paragraph :)

The Nvidia driver has very good performance, and for most usecases it’s… Fine. But it does bring extra hoops and issues. There’s a reason many distros have started to ship the “normal ISO” and the “nVidia ISO”.

The nVidia driver also uses kernel modules, which can interfere with secure boot.

And many modern features are developed for Wayland-only: Mixed refresh rate, mixed fractional scaling, HDR etc. And nVidia is behind on Wayland support, since they only recently decided to cave on and use the same pipeline as AMD/Intel instead of their own.

Sounds like you’ve been very unlucky. Even the open-source Nvidia driver should work out of the box and look OK. Performance is ass, but it’s good enough for a usable desktop experience (usable enough to install the proprietary nVidia driver, which at least on Ubuntu’s are just a few clicks in the GUI)

Instead of going Fedora, try PopOS. PopOS has a special ISO for nVidia graphics. Trying to “install” the Nvidia driver yourself on a live USB boot is not the way to go. I doubt it’s even possible.

I’ve been on (K)Ubuntu, and XBox controllers have literally just been plug and play. I could even use the KDE game controller settings page to compensate for the drift in my left joystick.

Another option is Bazzite, which is a version of Fedora Immutable (“Silverblue”) that comes with all the bells and whistles for gaming, including Nvidia drivers. However the immutable part may or may not be to your taste.

Breaktimer is free, open source and cross-platform.

Default is a reminder every 30minutues for a break, with a Snooze and Skip button. Snooze is very handy if you just wanna complete something you were in the middle of doing

No, not necessarily. Wine programs usually have access to your home directory as a Windows drive (X: or Z: or similar). So do be careful

Can’t recommend TreeStyleTabs enough!

Not only does it trade off precious vertical space for plentiful horizontal space, but also the tabs get organized hierarchical, so when searching and opening multiple tabs , the tabs get grouped naturally

Renewable energy is literally freedom energy. Geopolitical win for sure

How long have you had the composite deck? How has it stood up to UV? Like is it faded or getting brittle?

Well that’s progress. And yet they removed vertical task manager from Windows 11 😢

My windows laptop is sticking with windows 10 as long as I can, hopefully vertical taskbar is back by the time I’m forced to upgrade. Maybe by then it’s windows 12, continuing the tick-tock release cycle of good and bad Windowses 😂

Also, shoutout to Firefox addon TreeStyleTabs for having vertical tab management

Yeah fingers crossed, I also have one one order, but worried about the PSU

It sucks you had those issues, but it’s good to hear the support team does actually provide support

Flashback to ~2008-2009 when all laptops went from 16:10 to 16:9 and we couldn’t understand why. 16:9 was for TVs and watching movies. 16:10 was for computers to do work.

While it’s true finding 16:9 desktop backgrounds is easier, and watching movies and TVs without black bars is nice, 16:10 is much nice when actually using a computer to do work. Taskbars, toolbars, tabbars, headersbars etc take up a lot of precious vertical space, leaving less space for application content.