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System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

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321–330 of 378 posts

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to comment much on the rest, but the whole trope of: a Linux machine is not for someone who isn't comfortable with the cli" needs to die. My partner is essentially computer illiterate (she didn't know about keyboard shortcuts, even for copy paste before we met and still doesn't really use them) and has been using my old Ubuntu laptop for years. The only thing I do is tell her from time to time not just t…

The command line is a problem for intermediate users. I consider Linus from LTT to be at the upper end of intermediate and he was borderline incompetent in Linux. When you have enough knowledge to be dangerous and the hubris to assume you know everything you should need to know, you will find yourself in deep trouble quickly. The most computer illiterate will be fine, but they will not be buying a machine like this.…

> I'm personally having a hard time getting my 13 year old to debug issues in windows and linux because his expectations are just too high (probably years of ipad use). He expects things should just work and get frustrated too quickly.

Please persist in your effort. Teaching your kid logical thinking and scientific method ("debugging") and helping him not to be easily frustrated are probably skills that he will need anyway later on.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we also include how MS infiltrated the education system with hidden incentives and essentially forced training in a non-free user hostile operating system to multiple genrations of people? I think people had to learn Windows. They can learn Linux. The excuses are bs. Schools should teach unix/linux, and not proprietary systems. We should expect people to learn new things to be able to operate new tools. Tha…

> How about we also include how MS infiltrated the education system with hidden incentives and essentially forced training in a non-free user hostile operating system to multiple genrations of people? When was the last time you used Windows? Microsoft employees a small army of user experience designers to ensure it’s a great experience. It’s not perfect, but I can do everything I need to do using the GUI. This isn’t…

Holistic "experience" to me includes privacy protections. Windows spies on the user at every turn. GUI elements are not hard to get right. Launchers make it all even easier.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used 1080p all my life and never thought that I need it to be higher resolution. So for me the risk of Linux high DPI support not working, high cost and higher power usage make no sense to me.

Don't knock it till you try it. 80% of my usage is text - terminal, code or my notes. Even most of my web usage is text. I won't go less than a high dpi screen, preferably near 4k.

I'm happy with what I have. Why try for more, that just leads to misery when things "have" to be a certain way for you to be happy.

It's the sunset cigar thing. Guy watches the sunset from his porch every evening. One day he smokes a cigar at the same time. Loves it. Now he HAS to smoke a cigar every evening or he can't enjoy it. What has he gained?

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, you are wrong. I have quarter of century experience working on Linux including running it on all my laptops and desktops for 23 years. Over the years keeping it working started becoming what seems like a full time job and I jumped the ship for M1 MacBook Pro. It still has a lot of problems but at least I have more time to do my actual work. I understand I might just becoming less tolerant of wasting ti…

In my experience, the people who spend so much time maintaining their Linux are the people hacking on their OS. Which is something I encourage; the customizability of Linux is part of what makes it so great. But if you load up the newest Ubuntu lts on a laptop and never fiddle with configs, switch display managers/ desktops, etc, then there will be zero maintenance required.

I agree, if you install and never do anything with it it will usually work. But that isn't very high bar for usability. What about people who actually use their machines for anything else than just browsing Internets? I had people break it even in this relatively simple case.

I'll give you an example. I am using an external DAC (connected over Toslink). It starts up automatically when it detects digital audio signal and shuts down when the signal stops. Unfortunately, the startup sequence takes couple of seconds (it has a delay of 2s and then slowly increases the volume over 4s, can't be configured).

So in the default configuration, PipeWire insists to turn off the audio whenever there is no client to play anything for more than X seconds.

This is super annoying, every time you try to play youtube video after going to kitchen for coffee you are loosing first couple of seconds of audio.

This can be changed (remove a module that causes automatic suspend), but over last couple of years I had to redo this configuration at least 5-6 times after various PipeWire upgrades because PipeWire developers don't give a shit about user configuration and are happy to override it or in fact do some stupid things like move it from /etc to /usr/share so you are left guessing why your config files no longer do what they were supposed to do.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#325
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are afraid to fiddle with your BIOS, should you even be using Linux?

People shouldn't be afraid of technology, but we gotta come from a place of empathy—especially with people that are too old to have never gotten into PCs or now the younger generation who was raised on apps and mobile OS where even the file system is hidden, but really anyone can apply here. Linux, BSDs, et. al. should be for everyone. This includes easy-to-use interface for users with little current technical knowle…

Not belittling anybody.

But any grandpa or granny who can use YouTube, can do it simply by following instructions shown there.

People should at least be willing to do that.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That adjusts speed, not acceleration. Tweak Tool is indeed what’s needed, but it’s not apparent to a newbie. I spent hours finding that particular app when I first used Ubuntu. It’s absurd that that kind of functionality isn’t built in.

I thought that was a acceleration. Perhaps they'd not know of gnome tweaks, though they could remember Power Tools from Windows....

Mouse speed is how far the cursor moves for some distance of physical mouse movement. Mouse acceleration additionally makes the cursor's speed increase when the mouse's acceleration (change of speed over time) is faster.

Mouse acceleration is annoying (bordering on infuriating, imo) because it changes cursor movement from an easy 1:1 mapping of mouse movement->cursor movement by adding an additional dimension. You then not only have to keep in mind how far you're moving your mouse, but also how quickly you're moving it. I can't fathom why UI designers seem to think that it's so great that it should be present with no ability to disable it.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#327

One design choice I love here is having the track pad centered on home row, instead of centered on the laptop body. Lenovo has the same orientation. I recently had to switch back to a body centered track pad for work and now I'm aware of the contortions my right hand has to perform in order to type while also resting on the laptop. It slows me down and increases typos. For anyone who types with all 10 fingers, a home…

A well designed trackpad will have virtually flawless palm rejection, which means it shouldn't matter. I'm not sure how that fares outside of Apple machines though.

I get enough ghost touches to be annoying on the 2020 Macbook Air and Pro. What device is supposed to be better?

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#328
post #150

I had this laptop, but ultimately replaced it with a 14” M1 Max. Some thoughts: - The screen is so much worse, in every way, than a MacBook. A “low resolution” (more like, not high dpi) matte screen vs the M1 screen, there is no comparison. When I first got this machine, my eyes would have to adjust to the screen, and it felt so blurry compared to my works retina Touch Bar Mac - PopOS is great! It is definitely one o…

I don't want to comment much on the rest, but the whole trope of: a Linux machine is not for someone who isn't comfortable with the cli" needs to die. My partner is essentially computer illiterate (she didn't know about keyboard shortcuts, even for copy paste before we met and still doesn't really use them) and has been using my old Ubuntu laptop for years. The only thing I do is tell her from time to time not just t…

Same here. I put mint on my.computer illiterate girlfriend's old computer. She used it as effectively as any other os. The update issue is real though.

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the people who spend so much time maintaining their Linux are the people hacking on their OS. Which is something I encourage; the customizability of Linux is part of what makes it so great. But if you load up the newest Ubuntu lts on a laptop and never fiddle with configs, switch display managers/ desktops, etc, then there will be zero maintenance required.

I agree, if you install and never do anything with it it will usually work. But that isn't very high bar for usability. What about people who actually use their machines for anything else than just browsing Internets? I had people break it even in this relatively simple case. I'll give you an example. I am using an external DAC (connected over Toslink). It starts up automatically when it detects digital audio signal…

ArchWiki is a well-known recommendation to every newbie who has technical needs. Quote:

"PulseAudio will first look for configuration files in the home directory ~/.config/pulse/, and if they are not found, the system-wide configuration from /etc/pulse/ will be applied.

Tip: It is strongly suggested not to edit system-wide configuration files, but rather edit user ones. Create the ~/.config/pulse directory, then copy the system configuration files into it and edit according to your need. Make sure you keep user configuration in sync with changes to the packaged files in /etc/pulse/. Otherwise, PulseAudio may refuse to start due to configuration errors."

"[...]or by creating a new file that includes it with the syntax .include /etc/pulse/name. For simple changes the latter is preferred because the user will not be required to update the file when system-wide defaults change."

So this particular example is moot unless PA somehow disregards the /home config and loads its system-wide config anyway or does some weird overrides. Any details or other examples?

Re: System76 Lemur Pro Linux laptop with 14 hours of battery life

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The command line is a problem for intermediate users. I consider Linus from LTT to be at the upper end of intermediate and he was borderline incompetent in Linux. When you have enough knowledge to be dangerous and the hubris to assume you know everything you should need to know, you will find yourself in deep trouble quickly. The most computer illiterate will be fine, but they will not be buying a machine like this.…

> I'm personally having a hard time getting my 13 year old to debug issues in windows and linux because his expectations are just too high (probably years of ipad use). He expects things should just work and get frustrated too quickly. Please persist in your effort. Teaching your kid logical thinking and scientific method ("debugging") and helping him not to be easily frustrated are probably skills that he will need…

Thanks, I agree 100%. It's a process, he's a hormonal teenager at the moment that I have to wear white gloves with when it comes to these things. We are making progress, tho... since I got him the Steamdeck he's been in Linux about 90% of the time and asking tons of questions.
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