You could do it in 6GB of RAM with windows subsystem for linux.

S3 is what people actually think of when they think of sleep mode, or modern standby. The running state of the operating system is stored in RAM, in low power mode. All context for the cpu, other hardware like disks and network is lost and those devices are completely shut down - bar the RAM. Basically, you close the lid at the end of the day, and you’re nearly at the same charge level the next morning.

This saves a lot of power. On my older 8th gen intel cpu laptop, it loses maybe 1-2% charge per day in this mode.

My new 13th gen laptop still has deep sleep, or standby (s3) as a hardware function, but it’s technically not supported. It actually doesn’t work when enabled, and just falls back to s1 (sleep, everything’s still on, just in low power mode). It loses about 2-3% per hour in this mode

S4 (Hibernate) does roughly the same as S3, but the OS state is stored to the disk instead of ram, so that can be shut off too. Now the device is completely powered off, losing no charge while ‘asleep’.

S5 is off

S4 sleep takes much longer to wake up from than s3, so was less desirable. In the modern computing world (especially end user devices), commonly there’s full disk encryption going on, which adds a layer of complexity to resuming from disk, as you would when waking up from hibernation (s4).

Making it resume without putting in a decryption password for example (using a TPM), isn’t simple, and breaks a lot when you do system upgades

I can honestly say my space grey first-gen magic keyboard has served me well. It sits on my desk at work, I use it every day, and it only needs charging once every few months.

The only thing I’ve ever done to damage it is pulling the z key off to clean between the keys, I tried to jam it back on wrong and ruined part of the scissor mechanism

My next keyboard may yet be one of the newer models, but it’s to expensive to pull the trigger yet.

Having tried it in person, I’m also considering the logitech mx keys mac variant. I didn’t even notice the key shaping while actually typing, and it’s the first keyboard I’d say comes close to being a magic keyboard replacement.

I like the option(alt)/command(super) switched layout.

I’ve got a keychron k3 ultra v2 too. I finally gave in on the mechanical keyboard train and splurged a bit - but now:

• I need a wrist rest, even this ultra low profile version is way higher than I’m used to.
• I hate the layout (my own fault for buying the most cramped version)
• On linux at least, bluetooth is not the greatest (sometimes needs a keyboard restart to fix key send delay and repeat keys)
• I picked the optical (cherry mx red equivelant) switches and they’re mushy af.

I’ve had the white slim first-gen mini magic keyboard for years too. The battery swelled up, so I removed it and use it wired now. That was probably 8/9 years old.

As shocking as this might be, I think he’s agreeing, and offering supplimentary proof

Ubuntu GUI/apt fail

Back when I used ubuntu, Unity was stuck with old gnome packages. This meant that the version gnome-terminal packaged with ubuntu (up to at least 18.04) didn’t have text reflow on window size changes.

You could add the upstream sources, upgrade the specific text reflow package only, and then disable the sources.

I forgot to disable the sources, or typed dist-upgrade (this happened multiple times…). Broke the whole desktop/lightdm setup with half upgraded packages, and half removed packages (for preparation to install new versions). Way easier to reinstall the os than to disentangle. Unity was a mess then anyway.

Moral: Actually read the package change summaries when doing updates/removes/installs, and [ y/N ] means actually check what the removed you think you’re agreeing to.

BtrFS snapshots for idiots

I’ve also run automated snapshots on my btrfs partition, then run out of space doing multi-hop system upgrade on fedora (dnf has a plugin that creates a snapshot every time it kicks in.

You can imagine there were many changes happenning per snapshot, and I effectively could have rolled back 4 major fedora versions… Til I ran out of space.

I couldn’t get a replacement drive in time, and I had an hour to rebuild my laptop before needing to be on a customer site, so sadly I couldn’t preserve my drive for later investigation. My best guess is the high-water-mark was configured incorrectly, and somehow it was able to ‘write’ data past the extents of the filesystem.

Rollback did work for my home partition, but I had to mount it from another OS to get it to work - so no data loss!

By that time I’d already reinstalled the os to the root partition/subvolume however, so I couldn’t determine the exact cause of failure :(

Moral: Snapshots are not backups, and ‘working’ is not ‘tested’

Musicolet is my choice too.It’s not on fdroid, but the dev makes the apk available from their site

You might check your BIOS clock time too, if the certs are ‘expired’, it might be the future, or more likely, the past. Certs have validity timers that specify start and end.

It’s more likely that your BIOS is just old, and you’ll have to keep secure boot disabled from now on.

You’d be surprised. I’ve got a mid-tier i7 laptop from 2017 and it munches through most productivity tasks.

It’s my i9 desktop that suffers when I’m running everything I want to have up. Between containers and compilers, VMs and videos, tabs and terminals, you can really put the hurt on a machine. I likely won’t be swapping until everyhing has adopted 45, or until I figure out how to make hyprland work the way I want it to

I don’t have a particular problem with their security, I just don’t have a clear picture of what they’re about yet - and I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve investigated it and found everything’s in order.

Gnome’s mouse thing is about running the human input devices in a separate thread, prioritized over the rest of its spawned processes. The practical upshot is, if your system is chugging under the weight of too many programs, your input won’t be laggy

I’m not a a current user of immutable distros, but I’m in the same boat as you. Interested in immutable os’s, running fedora workstation, getting bored.

I’ve been working on independent setups to see how I’d get customization working on an immutable distro. Some combination of containers seems like how I’d go. See this explanation.

For example, I’m running a wayland system, and RemoteApp/Rails on freerdp only works with X. Xwayland is currently broken on my system (installed as fedora 39 *beta). I require this for work. I installed distrobox with debian 12 bookworm, installed the required packages and it works like a charm.

On immutable OS’sI have been watching Vanilla OS for a while. I really like what I see. I’m just not sure what the security posture of it is.

The biggest thing holding me back is Gnome 45. It’s so good. Having an independent prioritized thread for mouse/keys makes it feel so smooth.

I’ve built hyprland and begun adding all the essential pieces to make it a viable replacement for Gnome. I’m not there yet, but once I figure out ad-hoc multi-monitor support with docks, I will be.

*edit

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5571/focus-window/

Something like this would do it. Looks unmaintained as of Gnome 41. It may or may not work with higher versions

This will definitely be a problem if you upgrade to 45, as all plugins will need to be updated to work.

That’s a real shame, because your question reignited my own search for the same thing

Thank god

I have, I think the one time I tried it (5 years ago, on a different machine, os and X11), it wasn’t snappy enough. Probably time to go back and check it out!

Guake has this annoying bug on wayland gnome where the interface complains that ‘keybindings can’t be set’, so you control it through custom keybindings that run terminal commands to show and hide the terminal.

And we shall watch its development with great interest.

Thanks!

guake-terminal for a full-screen overlay terminal, I have a keybinding for transparency toggle so I can read guides through the overlay. I used to use tilda, but I switched because they weren’t supporting wayland.

For random/ad-hoc terminals I’ve historically used gnome-terminal and console, but recently I’ve been trying to eliminate window decoration entirely, and for that I’ve been liking black box (flatpak) for the floating decoration and other configuration bits.

They both support theming, and have dracula included by default, so it was easy enough to get a consistent look and feel.

I have tabs switched off for all of them. That’s what tmux is for.

edit: I’ll probably be checking out alacritty

Apparently there has been a problem with gtk4 apps and theming in flatpak, only supporting adwaita light and dark - only found vague reference to it though, nothing concrete.

Try

flatpak-metadata sockets

To see if you can find the GTK_THEME environment variable.

You’ve given it permission to access the themes folder, now you need go point it at the themes

sudo flatpak override --env=GTK_THEME=my-theme 
sudo flatpak override --env=ICON_THEME=my-icon-theme

Where my-theme is the theme name, e.g. Adwaita-dark

Apparently the flatseal gui has some functionality to set the theme too! Will check it out tomorrow to see what’s up.

Is it being forced to look for a theme installed via flatpak maybe?

I’ve got a family member on one running mint.

I’ve run debian and fedora on the late 2013 model. Trackpad gestures used to be handled by libinput-gestures (found on github), and would handle tap double tap and swipe up to 4 fingers - though I think there are some gestures that are just handled by some window managers these days

Edit: added link