Quoting: DerpFoxBut for the onsite premium support you have to shell out a pretty big sum of money most of the time, nearly as much as the price of the machine itself.

This is certainly true. The 5 year support term was 1/3 of the price of the laptop, but I also think that it's completely worth it. I'd be spending more than that in 2-3 years when it breaks and I have to get a new laptop.

Quoting: DerpFoxThe big problem is consumer grade brands, they are inconsistent in their design and the warranty is subpar. Most of the time you can't just go buy spare parts. Or have to rely on third parties for that.

What I find surprising is how expensive business line laptops and parts are when they are so standardized and stream lined.

Completely agree on the low quality of consumer-grade laptops. As for the expense of business laptops...businesses are always willing to pay more for reliability. It's why Microsoft makes most of its money out of businesses, not consumers; they're a more reliable market.

While not all B2B companies treat their business customers well (Oracle), in general, they are treated far better than regular customers. If you treat business customers well, you will be rewarded with years and years of loyalty and guaranteed cashflow. You can also afford to knock up the prices a bit over time without fear of your customers jumping ship to whatever looks cheaper, because they'll start worrying about whether it's reliable as what they have now.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualOn the flip side, Dell has always been the best option if you want to keep your laptop for a long time. You can get up to 5 years of next-day business repair, anywhere in the world.

For me, this is like arguing against criticism of Microsoft's practises with "on the flip side, they got a really good support department!".

I realise this example is incidental to the point you're making, but Microsoft's support department is terrible. They pioneered having terrible support so that customers would never contact them for help, and now every mega technology corporation like Google and Facebook has followed suit. Have you tried contacting Microsoft's support department recently? I have.

I'm not saying that Dell's great support cancels out all they've done wrong but rather explaining why I made the choice to use them exclusively recently. It's not a counter-point but something additional to consider. I view the laptop market in general as an unfriendly industry, leaving people with terrible choices to make.

It was a lot of hard work trying to find a laptop WITHOUT a discrete GPU but with reasonable ports, like an ethernet port, 3+ USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and a HDMI port. I really don't want to play the dongle game. Dell has a business lineup of laptops that has good ports but no discrete GPU, which is exactly what I wanted. That was another reason I went for them.

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI spent several hours looking for a replacement charger for my ASUS laptop, but no one sells one.

See, this is the point: You don't NEED a ASUS charger unless ASUS are jerks. You can use any multi-charger with the right output, make sure it's the right voltage and ampere and off you go. That's the whole point.

I have several multi-chargers at home (due to a unhealthy obsession with guitar pedals :D) and the charger connectors on laptops today are largely standard (inner and outer ring). Also on the Dell laptops. So you CAN use a non-Dell charger on that laptop, it will boot and run, the motherboard will just not allow the battery to be charged due to a tiny controller on the motherboard that checks this.

And no support department in the world justifies this, imo. It's bad practise.

As someone with...not much knowledge about electronics, I personally have no idea what to do here. Where do I even find a charger like this? How do I get the right output? I was looking for a charger compatible with the ASUS-supplied charger, but they don't exist (for a laptop sold 2 years ago). At least I know Dell won't leave me out to dry or force me to buy an entirely new product to replace it (Apple). Companies intentionally encumbering their products annoys me, and that's why I'm so vehemently against DRM. I'm not attempting to justify this behaviour.

I'm not sure how long I'll stick with Dell, but I'm definitely never going back to buying a laptop from a physical store location. That's when you get wrapped up in their customer support scams which are always worse than what the manufacturer offers. Even if you bought a Dell laptop at one of these locations, they wouldn't offer you the 5 years of next-day business repair service.

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Quoting: BeamboomDo Dell still operate with a charger technology where the battery won't charge unless it's an original Dell charger?
They had an additional signal sent in the charger cable that told the motherboard if it was a charger from their brand. If not, the battery would not charge.

That's what made me promise to never touch a Dell product again. Stuff like that furiates me.

On the flip side, Dell has always been the best option if you want to keep your laptop for a long time. You can get up to 5 years of next-day business repair, anywhere in the world. Dell will come to you even if you are on holiday, to your hotel, to repair your laptop for you. No other manufacturer offers you this that I am aware of; they always want you to send your laptop in, if not ship it via post, wait 2-4 weeks, and more than likely they'll be unable to repair it because they stopped producing those parts months or years ago.

Dell sells replacement/spare parts on their official website. I spent several hours looking for a replacement charger for my ASUS laptop, but no one sells one. In order to get a replacement charger, I had to send my laptop in for repair and wait a month for it to come back. Huge pain.

That's when I made the decision never to buy a laptop from any manufacturer other than Dell. I had always used Dell laptops before, but my previous two laptops were ASUS laptops. After experiencing trouble with both of them, I've just accepted that it's a fact of life that laptops are going to break down, faster than you think.

On chargers: when I bought my current laptop, Dell upsold me the wrong spare charger (which was actually a power bank); the power bank could only be charged using a charger from 6+ years ago, which I fortunately had because I've had Dell laptops for a long time.

Laptops invariably all suck, I think, but Dell offers you the most recourse. At least Framework is around now for those interested in repairing their own devices.

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Is this the laptop with the invisible trackpad?

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It would seem to me, that regardless of whether it's a native port or only supported through Proton, some of these games are eventually going to face regressions. Native is no guarantee of reliability, as seen in ARK's case. Buying games to play on Linux is inherently unreliable because the platform is unstable. Even Proton, which is more stable than Linux as a platform, still faces regressions like Deep Rock Galactic did last month.

No Tux, No Bux makes no sense in this context. No one, save for a handful of indie developers, cares that much about making sure their games keep working on Linux. A native port is a poor indication of which developers care, as in the case of ARK.

It's not hard to see why everybody likes Proton. Game developers don't have to put much, or any effort into supporting a Linux playerbase who naturally doesn't expect their support. Linux users don't have to rely on the developers to support them to continue playing the game. It's a win-win. Being a Linux user means accepting that 99% of the time, the vendor expects you to be using Windows or macOS, and you have to find a workaround to get it working on Linux—they're used to this shit.

Valve have built-in a workaround that has a very low amount of friction most of the time, which is impressive, but I don't think that any amount of duct tape will be able to obscure the indifference of developers toward Linux.

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I don't know how Textorcist made it onto the Verified list. That game freezes for a few seconds as soon as you type above 60wpm (this makes it difficult to dodge bullets), not to mention it's a typing game controlled entirely by the keyboard while simultaneously being a bullet hell. Protondb reviews mention input lag, which I don't remember, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had. How this makes a worthwhile experience on the Steam Deck, I do not know.

I had a decent time with it on a desktop despite these flaws. The writing and story is mediocre, but I think it's one of the better typing games.

There's an official announcement from the developers that it was Verified, but again, I really have no idea how such a clearly keyboard-centric game would make a good experience on the Steam Deck (even putting aside the bugs): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/940680/view/3173356392642099069

But, TIL there's DLC for Textorcist. Nice to know.

Apparently someone has tried this on the Steam Deck but I don't really understand their explanation of their experience: https://steamcommunity.com/id/Chadworthy/recommended/940680/

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI tried to give Fedora a shot last year when my laptop's NIC died, but I couldn't figure out how to get the Wi-Fi driver compiled. I messed around with DNF, Yum, and probably yet another package manager but never ended up getting an internet connection after a few hours. On Arch, it took me about 2 hours to follow a pretty simple guide to getting my Wi-Fi drivers compiled.

I don't think I'll ever be able to use another distribution; Arch is the only one I've been able to figure out.

Hours to do what now? Sometimes I feel like using Mint and using most other distros is more like using a whole different OS. You install it, the stuff works, you start using it. Two hours? To compile a basic thing? Or worse? Gah. I don't have the time (or knowledge) for that nonsense.

To figure out how to do it. The guide was simple, but the process is not entirely intuitive and I screwed it up a few times by missing packages. Knowing how to do it properly now, it takes about 5 minutes to compile on a 2009 CPU.

Unfortunately the WI-Fi drivers are not mainlined, so you would have had to compile it on any distribution. https://github.com/RinCat/RTL88x2BU-Linux-Driver

I tried to follow the Github instructions on Fedora but couldn't get it to work, from memory. I just had no idea what to do, and couldn't find any easy way to get them working following Fedora's wiki.

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I tried to give Fedora a shot last year when my laptop's NIC died, but I couldn't figure out how to get the Wi-Fi driver compiled. I messed around with DNF, Yum, and probably yet another package manager but never ended up getting an internet connection after a few hours. On Arch, it took me about 2 hours to follow a pretty simple guide to getting my Wi-Fi drivers compiled.

I don't think I'll ever be able to use another distribution; Arch is the only one I've been able to figure out.

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Quoting: CFWhitman

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualYou mention other "installer type things", but I'm assuming you're referring to .sh install scripts. These are not really the same thing as Windows or macOS. For one thing, depending on how they're implemented, they may not solve the dependency issue at all. They're also often difficult to uninstall and create havoc on the user's system. Flatpak and AppImage are not like this.

Just for the sake of historical accuracy: Besides shell scripts there were things like InstallShield (basically still a script) available as distribution agnostic installers. Also, both of these things were pretty much exactly the same thing as Windows used for everything at the time (before the Microsoft Installer package manager existed). It's still possible to find Windows programs that use a script instead of a proper .msi package. Of course the scripts were only as good as the person creating them took the time for. However, generally, these old install scripts installed programs in /usr/local or /opt and didn't leave a mess behind (the weaker ones usually just left you with dependency issues for the so-called "installed" software they were for). You were more likely to get a mess when compiling software and using the 'make install' target that the developer created for make (though there were ways to deal with that cleanly as well).

The universal installer idea for Linux isn't very new. There were things like Zero Install (still maintained last I knew) and Klik (which AppImage is based on) quite a while back.

Thank you for the correction. I've only recently become a GNU/Linux user, so I don't have first-hand knowledge of what the landscape was like 10+ years ago. No one seems to mention these distribution methods in the histories I've read. The InstallShield Wikipedia page only mentions that it's used for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield

I don't know how it was back then, but a considerable number of the scripts I've used in the past year or so didn't have uninstall scripts.

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Quoting: DerpFox

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualFlatpak tackles some long-standing distribution issues with GNU/Linux. It's not perfect, but something like it needs to exist in the future in order to deal with these problems that simply don't exist on macOS or Windows.

So do the "others". And each one of them have their own set of good and wrong. The one I had the least problem with is AppImage, and I don't particularly like it, it has plenty of design problems but each one I tried worked flawlessly. The one I want to try the most is Flatpack but each time I tried it was a huge pain in the ass to set up, didn't understand how I should do it, and it keeps throwing errors at me. Their doc makes it look easy, but when you get errors, you are on your own and good luck to find what they mean. And it seriously lacks a GUI to make installation fast and easy.

I remember having a bad experience with Flatpak a few years ago, but I tried it two weeks ago, and the process was as simple as installing Flatpak and following the on-screen instructions for the Flatpak package (which was [code]flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Evolution[/code]). Given I don't really use Flatpaks much (and I've since removed this package after Arch fixed Evolution), I don't know how much worse it gets.

I said "something like it needs to exist," not necessarily Flatpak. But it's pretty obvious AppImage is not going to win the mindshare battle.

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