Thank you yet again for doing these! <3

It’s exceptionally well as always!

I heavily agree on this for most people. Sadly books, actual lectures and classes and online tutorials haven’t been working for me before.

It must really fucking suck being a teacher in programming and having invested time into a book or online tutorial/study thing today. I hope EU will legislate AI training.

This was my usecase when learning JS. I’ve always had a very very difficult time with programming and wrapping my head around those types of patterns. But with the help of AI I was able to get a quicker understanding and being able to ask followup questions, explain what different symbols do, nowadays I use it as a basic reference to get a starting point to some solutions while just being well versed enough to approach a lot of things on my own.

I often try to switch around and experiment with different similar and potentially better approaches unless it’s giving me one of those responses that have been the most bogstandard straightforward way of doing it… because of a stackoverflow answer from 12 years ago. But those are often the more simpler queries. But each day I practice my programming I turn to search engines more and more to adapt similar problems to my own so the kickoff of using AI got me to the point where I had a stronger understanding of how things work in a practical learning method that worked really really well for me.

I hate how great AI can be in some use cases while I also am part of the reason for excessive power usage of GPUs :( but I really don’t think I would’ve been able to get as far as I’ve come today without it.

I got a pre-order LCD Deck (256GB) from mid-October. While I don’t game too much on mine but mainly do desktop work, mostly server management and web development, it holds about 3 or 4 hours depending on how heavy the task is. When I play No Man’s Sky it’ll last about an hour.

I can’t see battery health as easily in GNOME tho. But I’m not complaining. This is while being plugged into a USB-C external 1080p OLED monitor and mouse and keyboard connected with Bluetooth.

For people wondering how the battery health is calculated, I’m guessing it’s what the factory max charge was in watt hours and how many it comparably holds now during max charge. That’s at least how I’ve seen battery health being calculated before!

Currently I’m playing through Ready Or Not, the engine update and them adding FSR3.0 made the game playable at the best of times! However the Deck still freezes and crashes occasionally sadly.

And Linux Mint DE instead of NixOS and Arch Linux and openSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora 😊

Almost sounds like it, these were all recent experiences. I’ve been looking at Lenovo previously as a potential “look-at-first” brand, can’t really say goto since if there was something more fitting I’d drop them in a heart beat back when looking for laptops but their offerings were cheaper and on paper didn’t seem to lack much.

I had my internship there this year. The issues with my lenovo laptop started in 2021 after I bought it, managed to get my money back after 2 years late last year and decided to go full time on the Steam Deck as my personal computer alongside a portable monitor.

The HP laptops all felt pretty solid when I set them up, the company gave me a spare Lenovo laptop that was just laying around that worked okay, forgot which model but I think it was probably around their 1200 euro range probably. But the HPs didn’t have much in terms of keyboard flex and the trackpad felt really nice, however I was only having it for a couple of hours before they were being repackaged to get to the customer so no real time to judge anything.

I ralso recognised having brand loyalty towards prefab computers were pointless pretty early on. Everything from the lack of upgraidability to the lack of easy access to repairs and sending enormous parts for minor things just wasn’t cutting it for me. I’m glad with my Steam Deck now actually, with my monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse I can manage my own IT stuff at home from anywhere and do my dev stuff pretty comfortably. Knowing I can also go to ifixit to buy spare parts whenever I want is a nice bonus!

As for HP being shit in every other area, yea, I’m always gonna keep in mind to not buy their printers and stay away from them as much as possible.

What did add up on Lenovo’s side was their customer support in my country. They were very kind and helpful regarding my issue but I couldn’t sit around and wait for it to be fixed and them trying 100 different things.

But thank you for telling me your experience, I’ll make sure to keep it in mind when getting my job and hopefully have the opportunity to be able to give someone something that won’t break!

Would love to hear your thoughts on HP. I had an internship at a IT company doing general setup and maintenance for businesses IT and since each consultant managed their own customer they often stuck with their own brands.

Having setup some of these I often felt like Lenovo was hot garbage, I’ve had a lenovo laptop with terrible manufacturing issues and the company I was at too and some of my friends. I would feel lucky if I get a Lenovo laptop without errors. Dell I haven’t heard anything bad of in general, one employee usually preferred buying them and then one other preffered HP. There was one or two people there who ordered Lenovo simply because they were so much cheaper for the specs but build quality and other components are just so garbage.

Of course, I’m not speaking about their budget 300 euro to 700 euro laptops now. The ones I was able to handle and setup were all 1300 to 3500 euros.

This is true.

I started playing recorder in 2018 and have been practicing ever since, bought a couple different instruments after that and it’s been great. I joined a recorder ensemble too and we do local plays every now and then!

Since I started learning I learnt the alt recorder and tenor recorder too. Then I had a ukulele laying about I started to learn as well. I also bought a trumpet but learning that has been slow, I also got a Venova, kalimba, accordion and melodica laying about that I play on occasionally.

I think it’s a mix of finding the right instrument and inspiration to get a goal of. The only reason I started practicing recorder was because of this meme from VRChat

While I love Bazzite and have been using it as my primary OS on my only computer which is a Steam Deck, I’m not sure I can agree that a non-tinkerer should go with it. I’d probably follow along the Linux Mint train honestly. It’s an honest project with their heart in the right place and makes usability a breeze and with a wider community than rpm-ostree based Fedora it’s probably gonna be more minor issues and annoyances in the long run.

I wish I could upvote twice, you’re gonna save me so much time.

I’m there too right now. Got a DS720+ but it’s struggling a little since I’m also self hosting mail through it. I’ve been eyeing to use NC as a replacement for everything but do get mixed feelings from threads like these lol

I hope to in the future get a proper little mini PC with a disk enclosure in the future to have as a replacement for that however!

Out of curiosity, what do you use instead?

That’s so weird, I decided to completely drop Google as my primary a while back because by the end, the only search results I got was literally only spam and SEO spam/adware links on anything I ever searched. DDG didn’t have any of this. Could search how to do something on a Foss project running on my server and 80% of the results were spam links and the other weren’t even relevant to the search. For me Google took a shit, Bing was slow and DDG was just a good in-between.

I grew up with the cheapest and most worn down vacuum cleaners. It was awful, everything from having to pull it out of a cabinet to finding an outlet and, having bad suction, awful cleaning heads and annoying hoses.

So when I got my own apartment and worked for a bit I decided to go all in on a Dyson Absolute V12 Detect. It’s actually very painless and super quick to vacuum now. Also a bit fun.

With a rechargeable battery it’s wireless and the battery lasts me about 4 vacuuming sessions in my apartment, no keeping track of vacuum bags and filters. All in all it takes me from touching my vacuum to being done cleaning my, albeit 1 room apartment, about 10 minutes. It’s great!

I’m thinking it’ll probably be way better for sustainability as well. Since I do need the performance I do and the Deck hits that performance within a good margin having to spend €12000 on a laptop with good build quality and good specs just for it to break or have some shit happen to it after the warranty is out feels like shit. So I’m thinking because the setup is semi-modular and each of the part of the setup isn’t super expensive it can still be worth it in the long-ish run. My steam deck break? I buy a new part from ifixit. The monitor breaks? Worst case scenario I can get a new one and possibly an upgrade since this market is new and moving. Keyboard and mouse breaks? Easy to replace that too.

Downside of course being the clunkiness of having to carry around all that and the time spent setting it up rather than just getting the laptop up and fold it up.

Something along the lines of 2K or more with at least good colour accuracy would suffice for me! It’s all I need for the photo editing part. Having plugged it into my 4K TV it went very well. All the UI elements and such displayed perfectly and smoothly for the most part. So 4K on the Steam Deck is most definitely doable! At least if you disregard gaming that is which isn’t the main goal for this project.

Does your steam deck output to 8K when you plug it into the TV? How are UI elements and FPS on that resolution for you? Would be fun to see where the limit would be.

This has been my primary concern with getting this to work as well. If I do decide to go with the portable monitor which I’m leaning more towards now it’ll for sure be a bit more clunky to get out the monitor, plug in the steam deck, pull out a mouse and keyboard and make sure their paired and then get going. Our trains here are very spacious most of the time unless it gets crowded so for the most part that itself wouldn’t be too big of an issue but depends on how much effort I feel needs to go into getting everything setup for my usual 40 minute train ride to get a few write-ups on my assignment done. Realistically I would probably skip the monitor and get the keyboard out and use the touchscreen thinking about it.