I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.

Beyond the lack of IO (not even a removeding hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.

The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.

It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.

And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.

The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.

You haven’t used Ubuntu Server… The resolv.conf is managed by the network manager (NetworkManager if I recall correctly). But if you configure the DNS in NM it won’t survive the reboot because there is another layer on top, cloudinit.

You can’t push to github without an account. That’s how github can validate that you have the rights to push. If that is a problem, host your own gitea instance.

Once you have an account, the way to do it is using ssh keys. Use ssh-keygen (or putty keygen) to generate a key pair, add the public key to your account, and the set up ~/.ssh/config.

Wow, that’s exactly what I have been missing in my life. Amen, brother!

What I think the biggest problem with the traditional package managers is that (1) they don’t isolate packages from each other (when you install a program files are placed in many random places, like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc) and (2) you can’t have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time.

This creates a lot of work for package maintainers who need to constantly keep packages up to date as dependencies are updated.

Also, because of this, every distro is essentially an insane dependency tree where changing even one small core package could break everything.

Because of this, backwards compatibility on Linux is terrible. If you need to run an older application which depends on older packages, your only choice is to download an older distro.

This is what snap and flatpak try to solve. I think they are not great solutions, because they ended up being an extra package manager next to the traditional package managers. Until we see a distro that uses flatpak or something similar exclusively, the problem is not solved.

It’s not worth it. Ram is dirt cheap, you can get 8gb for like $30. For $150-$200, you can find an used Thinkpad that will perform 1000x better.

I would only use such a machine for playing with old software like Windows 2000 or XP, old Linux distros.

What I don’t like about buying things from abroad is that RMA-ing gets difficult and expensive.

Because these are small shops that have limited availability outside North America, and are fairly expensive compared to Thinkpads which are widely used by corporations, and can be found pretty cheaply.