Minisforum V3 is 12” and less than 1kg.
But it is not quite a laptop, expensive and very powerful - not sure if that suits you.
Linux wise, most of the stuff works (sleep, power profiles, volume buttons, fingerprint reader, face recognition, pen, touchscreen). Things that don’t work are automatic rotate/accelerometer.
I’m super happy with it, running arch, doing development and using VMs
Let me be more concrete then. What I am used to is the following:
Every step is a button click or a entry field in a dialog. These steps also work on every major distro. And I wish for a similar experience when developing KDE Plasma.
For completeness, I will try to do the same dev things and list the steps for KDE Plasma development later (in about 8h).
Very nice.
I’m very excited, because in the past I have bounced off KDE development. Coming from a java and web background, the tooling and dev environment was just mindboggling.
Install literally every package from the repo, then you can experience breaking OS every day.
The most annoying ones for me personally, in no particular order:
tldr: nothing works - sorry for being bitter
I have reported and/or commented on existing issues when plasma 6.0.0 rolled out on arch and there has been no work on them as far as I can see.
I even asked in the matrix dev rooms.
They were not even triaged. So some describe the same issue multiple times. Check the ones which had activity in 2024:
I just hope they fix window rules
As far as I can see it is just Debian with LXDE, firefox ESR and some other packages preinstalled.
If they respect the license, you as a user can ask for the source code by e-mail.
But from my point of view, you can just install plain old Debian and all the same software and get a long term proven OS that will not randomly disappear and a huge userbase for support questions.
I am not sure technically, but even if possible it would be a nightmare of resolving conflicts manually, since a lot of system files are constantly written to and read from and it would mess everything up if syncthing is overwriting the file at the same time.
or 3 way with an always on server (like a raspi or cheapest VPS with just enough storage) so that you don’t have to have both computers on at the same time (thats what I am doing currently and it works great).
I had some similar symptoms on a Fritzbox router, because by default the devices connected over wifi were unable to communicate with those connected by cable. Some routers also had this setting for the different wifi bands, 2.4G & 5G.
But I don’t think you’d be able to ping it if this were the case.
Check yoyr router settings anyway, maybe you’ll find something there.
Technically you are absolutely correct.
Practically, people need to get work done. And if they can’t do it on Linux, they will use another OS. No matter whose fault it actually is.
I have one server running arch and 3 running debian.
So far they are equally stable after running for about half a year.
Autoupdates are turned on on all of them. Which I am aware is against the arch wiki recommendations, but the server is not critical, easy to migrate and has nightly offsite backups anyway.
PDF was a proprietary format controlled by Adobe until it was released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.
Okular has no tripple click for whole line selection.
Other than that, setting up digitally signing with Okular never worked for me. Do you have a guide that worked for you?
Digitally sign a PDF with a couple of clicks.
So far, I have spent about 6 hours (sporadically over the past 3 years) trying to set up a way to do this, yet ultimately it didn’t ever work at all. And every time I end up using some online third party service just to get it over with.
I did it on Windows once and the setup was a simple 5 step wizard. After which digitally signing a document just works with a couple of clicks.
Bonus round:
on Linux there is only one PDF viewer that implements tripple click for selecting a whole line AND can invert the colors of the document (which helps some partially blind users). That viewer is Atril and it has no way of even attempting to digitally sign a PDF. As soon as you want to do the signing, you lose those one of the two features and people with impairments can’t do their work properly.
the screen readers have voices from the 90s and setting up anything modern with them is above my skill grade - as again, I fucked with it for days and didn’t manage to get a natural sounding voice to work. On Windows it is way simpler, including working well for mixed language documents - for example German text with technical terms in english or latin.
Try the tldr util on linux.
There is a website to check which hardware is supported (on which distro). You can look up your laptop there, but beware that it is crowdsourced, so there might have been tinkering involved before submitting the results or the results may be outdated.
Click on “probe your computer” then check the results to see what your current setup supports.
Depends on their specific needs, so they should probably jump into some Linux community and ask for themselves.
My anecdotal evidence includes vastly different experiences.
I have a friend who hates Linux desktop and exclusively uses it for running dev related stuff via WSL.
Another who uses Linux desktop primarely, but dualboots Windows for certain games.
And I am on Linux single boot and rarely use KVM (without GPU) for running my CNC or other software.