It’s not a “Linux” keyboard per se. It’s the same keyboard - it’s just one has a superkey symbol instead of a windows key symbol printed on it. They screwed up on my order and sent me a keyboard with a windows key on it. It’s a non issue, and I didn’t say anything - I’m sure they would have sent me the other keyboard if I bitched.

I read through those comments - there’s actually more complaints than those. Those weren’t that bad.

They updated the fan curves recently, mine runs fine. Fans aren’t silent when humming along, but normal use they aren’t even spinning.

Sleep is always a bitch on Linux. It doesn’t have great sleep life. I just shut mine down at the end of the day, and close the lid during the day.

I believe they fixed the amd graphics issues. I should have noted that I have a core ultra chip. I wish I had gotten the amd chip - but guess what - no biggie, I can upgrade later!

There was a complaint about the windows key. I will admit that I ordered the Linux keyboard and it pissed me off that I got a keyboard with a windows key. But I didn’t make a stink, I just deal with it.

There was fingerprint reader complaints. Mine just worked. Dunno what that was about.

My vote is a firm “buy a framework” and get a fun color. People will be jealous.

I just bought one a couple of months ago. It’s my daily driver. My work issued laptop sits on my desk, and I carry my framework around. If you’re a Linux guy, fedora runs fantastic on it - everything works, couldn’t be easier. Battery life could be better, but it’s fine. Trackpad is great, I heard some bitchin about it, but I don’t get that hate. Some complaints about the hinges and how they bounce. Again, unfounded complaints in my opinion. The hinges are stiffer to open/close than I expected, but they are fine (just a little different feeling). New webcam is great for a laptop webcam. New screen is nice - but let’s be honest, not much touches an apple screen. Sound is ok, nothing special. The case is fantastic-people (engineers and nerds) drool over it. The swappable ports are awesome, that alone makes the laptop imo. But the real star is the serviceability of it. Five screws and the whole thing comes apart. Everything can be replaced and upgraded. They even give you the screwdriver you need to take it apart. Bios updates work with fwupdate in Linux and they update regularly. Keyboard feels good. It stays cool and fans don’t go crazy.

It’s expensive. But I love mine. But I do plan on keeping it and upgrading forever - or at least until I smash it accidentally, so maybe it wasn’t expensive.

The 13 doesn’t have a gpu. It’s capable, but if you want to game on it, look at the 16. If you have specific questions I’d be happy to answer or post a vid/pic or something.

A couple of years ago I bought the pioneer BDR-XD07UHD. I just plug it in and it works great. It works flawlessly with makemkv and eac for ripping. I’ve used it on three PCs across Ubuntu, fedora, and endeavoros. No issues.

Amazon doesn’t sell this one anymore, it appears there’s a new version. Might be worth checking that one out.

You’re 100% right. It’s overkill and endless tinkering. But it’s also oh so good and you know it :)

This answer is FAR too complicated for the task asked for - yet I still recommend it to everyone because they are so damn handy.

Get a NAS.

You can set your own up or buy something like synology. I personally went the synology route and I adore that stupid box. Synology drive does exactly what you want across all my devices - PCs, phones, iPads, you name it. Real time sync. Keeps old copies in history. It does my photos off my phone. Every family member has their own personal space and keeps their stuff separate and private. My daughter uses my NAS as her personal OneDrive/dropbox/icloud. In your example drive would be installed on both the laptop and the steam deck. Both point to a location on the NAS and sync to and from there. EZ

Seriously, NASs are amazing. Get one and solve 100 little annoyances in one go.

Now that all said, for the question without a NAS. I would imagine just about any backup flatpak could handle backing up / synchronizing a folder. The trick is what’s the destination? If it’s the laptop folder, that’s fine - but that means the laptop needs to be on and connected to the network to work. I’d start there. Ideally it’d be smart enough to detect the destination folder coming online and immediately start the backup/sync.

Credit cards and these damn credit agencies are a cancer on society. I don’t know anyone at this point who hasn’t been a victim of identity theft because of these aholes and their shenanigans.

New iPhones bought from Apple that are unlocked “connect to any carrier later” work on all the networks in the us. Once upon a time, there was an “unlocked” phone - meaning you could change the sim and the phone wasn’t locked to a contract. But you still had to match the phone to the major carrier. For example, an att phone could be unlocked, and then used on straighttalk (becasue straighttalk resold att network). But it wouldn’t work on Verizon or T-Mobile because they were different networks.

That’s not a thing anymore with iPhones and hasn’t been for a long time. An unlocked iPhone can be used with any carrier that supports esims.

If your old phone is still on a contract - you may not be able to transfer the phone number, or have to request an unlock, or any other shenanigans. But the new iPhone will still work on whatever network you take it to.

Ideally, your contract is done, you buy new unlocked iPhone, you take it to your existing or a new carrier, you say “I bought a new unlocked phone, I want to set it up new, and I want you to transfer my number” a prime time carrier will just make this happen for you. A reseller can be a little more of a pain in the arse.

Personally I’ve been happy with the prepaid plans from straight talk - despite their setup process sucking. If you call them and get a person to help it goes pretty smooth. And the service is indistinguishable for a much cheaper price once it’s setup. I’m pretty sure this goes for most resellers.

Good luck - you’ll be fine!

I don’t understand this tbh. It’s here already. SteamOS will likely be just like the deck - immutable arch running the existing steam package.

You can totally do this today and it works great. Don’t want to mess with arch and that confusing command line? Use something easier like mint and install the flatpak - then you don’t even have to futz with nvidia drivers. Or use bazzite?

What does steamOS offer that we don’t already have? (Serious question)

Mint If you have bugs with mint - something newer like fedora will work Arch is a bad choice for you.

Oh no! The leopards are eating faces! Who could have foreseen this?

Physical held the least amount of info (you probably weren’t going to find much). Software like encarta was cool - had lots of info. But in the days of dinosaurs libraries was where it was at. It was common to ask an adult a question and you get either “I don’t know” or some BS that you believed was true (but wasn’t).

If you really wanted to know, you’d ask the librarian at school or at your towns public library and they’d help you find a book on that topic. Libraries were magical places - even for the people who were too cool to admit it.

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

That’s no excuse for littering - but it is super annoying.

There’s a dunks near me that moved its trash out of the drive in line WAAAAAAY over to the other side of the parking lot. Intentionally, so that I don’t bother them by throwing away, you know, the bag and napkins they give you.

That was the straw that broke the camels back - I just make my coffee now in the morning. It’s 1/100th the price and aggravation.

He’s gonna get rid of the income tax too right? Right?

No? So everything costs more and farmers go out of business. Got it. But hey, you maga aholes got to own us libs. That sure was awesome! /s. Have fun being homeless you tools.

Try endeavoros and use flatpaks. That’s basically manjaro with the following differences:

• current with the aur
• doesn’t have a built in gui software installer
• no modifications-it’s basically just arch with the things you would have probably installed

I don’t know. There’s a surprising amount of stupid people here. They live in near poverty and are easily manipulated into hating others as the reason for their miserable lives. It’s really that simple in my opinion. Yes there are lots of people who don’t vote, but I’m not sure that it would change the current split if they all did vote. We need more and better education.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.