Aaron44126

If you're interested and have a spare flash drive (8GB or larger) then it is easy enough to try. Download an Ubuntu ISO, follow the directions to make a bootable flash drive, and then boot off of that and poke around and see what you think. It will give you a full desktop environment with a web browser and you don't actually have to install anything. I think that the default GNOME desktop is good for beginners, but there are others that you can try. It is not as customizable as some others, but it is well-supported and very stable, and there are extensions that you can install to change some behaviors if you like. @Mr. Fox mentioned KDE Plasma and Cinnamon. I have tried both. I found Plasma to be my favorite, it is very flexible and a good power user experience, but also a big "rough around the edges" and buggy. Cinnamon is another solid option and good for new Linux users to check out, but I couldn't use it because I found high-DPI support to be lacking. Depending on what you do with your PC, it might be easy to transition to Linux or it might not. You've got to be open to things being a bit different. Linux does support older hardware better (IMO) so it could "breathe new life" into your machine, booting and operating much faster than Windows 11 does. You can easily install Steam on Ubuntu, and after toggling a few options in Steam settings, install any Windows game that you want (see YouTube videos for instructions). I just came off of using Linux as my main OS for two months and the main drawback to me was professional software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.) which you cannot use if there is no Linux version. There are free alternatives which will be fine if you only need to do light work in this area but probably frustrating if you are actually used to using them for productivity. "Why not charge for Linux?" No person or company is in a position to be the gatekeeper and charge for it. It is just a collection of free software. Even if Linux Torvalds decided that he was going to cut off free access require payment for the Linux kernel from now on, he would face pushback and likely legal challenges from other users who contributed code to the kernel under the open license. The software is licensed in such a way that no one can take it, create an "improved" (paid?) version, and then fail to contribute their changes back to the community if asked (without being ready to face copyright claims in court). If someone were to try to charge for it, then someone else would just make it available for free, and no one would use the paid option. I mean, Red Hat does charge for their distribution and they have a business model going off of that, but in that case you are more paying them more for the support than for the software. As for "fixes" and specific hardware support, indeed, as a largely community project then people get to pick and choose what to work on and their priorities might not be in line with yours.

Yeah, while Apple certainly does have issues, they are mostly a different class of issues. They value their top-to-bottom hardware/software integration so I do not think that they would allow their OS to be streamed to "any device". They have been a champion for the consumer in some cases (going up against the FBI over creating an "easy unlock" version of their OS, and winning; mandating user opt-in to tracking, causing a notable disruption to Facebook's revenue stream; deploying a mechanism to fully encrypt cloud data so that only users can access it) so I am giving them a chance. I do not expect that they won't change over time (possibly for the worse); they are a business after all and will follow the money. Right now, they know that they are financially benefiting from being the "end user privacy advocate" choice. Conflicted feelings. I don't like him either. But I was glad when he took over because I liked Steve Ballmer even less (at the time). I was initially pleased to see some initiatives start that never would have happened under Ballmer — WSL, and open sourcing .NET Framework, for example. But as time goes on it is increasingly clear that he's a key driving force in the direction that Windows has taken that I do not like. There will always be businesses and governments and use cases in general which won't tolerate this junk. This is why, for example, we have Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, which has a lot of the junk stripped out as well as the aggressive upgrade pushing; it is just really hard for "ordinary users" to get their hands on it. The same sort of crap is coming to more basic consumer devices, like TVs, which now have cloud services integrated, tracking what you watch, showing ads in the UI in some cases, and so forth. I'm still using a "dumb TV" which I got in 2012 (right before streaming services started being built-in to every TV) with a separate streaming box attached (.......Apple TV, actually). If I ever buy a new TV, I will go out of my way to buy a "commercial display" (which is what they use in hotels, airports, restaurants, etc.) which would have the same panel used in an ordinary consumer TV, but lacking the aggressive "smart TV" software features that all consumer TVs include now. ...All this to say, for now there are options available for users who want to avoid the direction that tech is going, you just have to bend over backwards and go through business channels to access it, and most consumers don't bother. [Edit] It might be the same for the iPhone/Siri issues that you were complaining about in another thread. Maybe the "cleanest" (but not "easiest") way to get around that is to put your phone under MDM management and turn the stuff that you don't like off from that side.

I saw this and I don’t see them taking away the option to boot local Windows, but rather adding another option to boot cloud Windows. Though, maybe some devices will ship with that as the only option someday. And obviously they are doing work to integrate cloud offerings into normal desktop Windows more and more, and monetizing whatever they can get away with. None of this is a direction that I really care for, which is why I am out. Funny how we have come full circle. You used to have dumb clients that connected to powerful mainframes because you couldn’t put much compute power into user terminals, for both physical space and cost reasons. That changed over time as things shrunk and got cheaper, and ordinary end user devices became more capable. Now we have powerful end user devices and companies are pushing to turn them back into dumb terminals. (I’d say cloud gaming is also trying to follow this trend somewhat.)

Derailing a little bit into an Apple/Mac/iOS discussion... Granted, six years of iOS updates doesn't mean you get all of the new features from those updates on old phone. For example, my 2017 iPhone X doesn't support some of the ML image features introduced in iOS 15 or 16 (don't remember), like being able to "extract" an object or person from an image or being able to recognize and select/copy text from an image. Those use the "neural engine" cores in the phone CPU which are only in the newer phones. Still, a lot of the features do make it over. If you are used to Android then you are used to not getting a new Android version immediately at release (unless maybe it is a Google phone); I understand that there is a "holding period" while the phone manufacturer produces an image for their phones (if they offer the update at all) and also it could need to be validated by the carrier? iOS updates are available on all eligible devices immediately at release. If you don't want to upgrade right away, they will still offer security updates for the previous version of iOS on devices that are eligible for the new one for a period of about three months. (This is new, just in the past two releases.) I haven't found Siri to be that bothersome. I rarely use it or even notice that it is around. I do have the "Hey, Siri" feature disabled, so when I do invoke it, I do it by holding down the power button. All I ever really ask it for is unit conversions, setting timers, and random numbers ("give me a random number between 1 and X" helps when my kids are having problems deciding on something ha). You can ask it to recognize a song that is playing in your environment which is sometimes handy. I did also disable "Siri suggestions" for the Maps app because if I don't, it tries to "suggest" the place where I want to go when I connect it to CarPlay in my car and it is usually wrong. That iCloud full client-side encryption feature is really cool and it is also pretty new, they just kicked it out in the past few months. It was sort of a sudden/surprise launch too, announced one day and then available to use the following week. I know they have gotten pushback from certain agencies (FBI/etc.) about encrypting everything so I think that they didn't want to give much time for complaints. Regarding the MacBook design and lack of upgrade potential, I see this too and it is a sore spot for me. I am mostly miffed by the lack of removable storage. That is something that definitely would get better over time and is perfect for a future upgrade. I would max out the RAM and CPU when I pick up the system so I don't think there would be upgrade potential even if those parts were modular. (Other than storage and RAM, not like the situation is that different from what most other laptops are doing these days 😕) Still, its a compromise that I am hoping will be offset by increased satisfaction of just using the thing. We'll see. I don't care so much about it being a slimmer build. The Apple silicon CPUs are way more tailored for laptop use than what Intel has been putting out lately, and there is not a discrete GPU so the dual-fan solution that they have should be enough to keep it cool. Interested to see how performance feels as well. I know that bigger Windows games will take a performance hit, going through Rosetta 2 (x86->ARM) and DirectX-to-Metal translation layers. I was watching some demonstrations on YouTube, and even a surprising number of games suddenly "work" now with Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, performance I was seeing on M1 Max was 35ish FPS for more complex titles at 1080p. I mostly play lighter titles, M2 Max should do a little better, and you can always lower settings to boost FPS. Maybe I'll kick off a new thread over in the macOS area once this thing arrives and I have used it for a while. I know there aren't many Apple users on this site. But I've at least seen @kojack thinking about the idea of switching to macOS as well on and off over the past few months.

I've been working to de-Google myself as well. macOS would also let me use Apple Maps in place of Google Maps, one of the few services from them that I still use with regularity. Otherwise I basically just use Google Voice as a "spam" phone number, and occasionally Google Search when DuckDuckGo isn't getting me what I want. I have an iPhone X, which is a 2017 model which is just going "out of support" this year (it will not get iOS 17 in the fall). I wish they would formally specify how much support each of their devices will get. Basically, you have to wait until WWDC and see what they do when they announce each OS. You can "guess" that they will drop one generation of devices every year, but sometimes they don't drop any devices at all (iOS 9, iOS 12, iOS 15) and occasionally they drop two generations at the same time (iOS 16 dropped both 2013 and 2014 phones). Right now, six years from launch is a pretty good guess for how long an iPhone will be supported with major OS updates. And they will still deliver security updates to older phones that don't get the latest OS for a while, so it is not like it is a hard cutoff when that time comes. (Still, they don't have a formal policy so you can't tell when security support is officially done.) One thing that did put me off from getting a Mac is the same thing. Don't know when it will stop getting major OS updates, they don't announce it more than a few months in advance. There are ways to run "unsupported" newer versions of macOS on older Intel systems, sometimes with caveats and sometimes without any issues at all, but it is not yet clear if that will be possible on Apple Silicon systems. If I stick with macOS, my plan would be to basically ride this MacBook Pro out until they stop offering OS updates for it (6-7 years?) and buy a new one at that point. And yeah, Apple is the only "big tech" company that I even remotely trust from a data privacy perspective. They have issues from time to time but overall they are a league above the major competition in that area (IMO). —————— I visited the local Apple Store this evening to play with a 16" MacBook for a little bit, partly to make sure that I am not crazy and that it would be tolerable to use. I wish the keyboard had more "depth" but it is not as bad as those butterfly ones that they used to have. I can say though that the screen is pretty amazing. I hadn't seen one of these new ones before. It is mini-LED and not OLED, but I couldn't discern any glowing or backlight bleed when maximizing a window, which causes the top bit of the screen around the notch to "disappear". It's just black up there.

Eh. Sort of opposite situation here. I spent the last two months trying Linux and in the end decided to just go and buy a MacBook. We'll see how it turns out...

Well, this was a fun two-month experiment, but it is coming to an end. One reason I am ending it is ongoing frustrations with my Dell laptop hardware and the direction they are taking their products in general. (My posts in the Precision 7X70 threads go into this.) Another is the lack of access to professional/commercial software, which I decided that I do actually want to use. (Visual Studio proper, Adobe products, Outlook/OneNote/OneDrive, etc.). I've been bouncing to a VM to use these but that's not really the workflow that I want. The final kicker is basically KDE's flakiness. I think that they just don't have the people/resources to deliver a fully polished experience. I keep having to add workarounds to get the behavior that I want when I feel that it should be just there. I already disqualified GNOME (see above) and none of the other DE's look like they have the functions that I want from a power user OS... at least any more readily available without tweaking than KDE does. Examples of niggling issues with KDE: At 200% DPI scaling (using X11), a maximized window of a QT application leaves an empty row of pixels along the bottom of the screen. This is not the case with GTK apps, so you could see a GTK app poking out from behind a QT app. There has been a bug report on this since 2019 with no action to fix it. It tries to take control of my keyboard backlight, overriding the BIOS behavior and forcing it off when the system is idle, but sometimes it does not remember to turn it back on. (I put in a script to fix that.) No option to automatically disable the touchpad when a USB mouse is connected (...I could script that as well). Moving the mouse at the lock screen will prompt for a fingerprint read, which will time out after 60 seconds if I am not ready for it (i.e. just moving the laptop from one room to another), so I have to intentionally botch the login and wait for a few seconds before it will be ready to try the fingerprint read again. As if to push me over the edge, last night while I was just working in OneNote on the VM, the system went and visually locked up. (Mouse could move but nothing actually worked. Except, the system was still up and running because stuff that I typed in OneNote would still be synced in to the cloud notebook, which I could also see on my phone.) This is not an exhaustive list. Stuff like this keeps popping up. It's like lots of little paper cuts. What to do? Well, I'm not going back to Windows. I put in a lot of thought and investigation before deciding on this next step. I'm going to give macOS a go. I'm ordering a maxed out MacBook Pro 16" and it should be here Wednesday Tuesday. (If I'm going to have a system that is a pain to repair, let's at least have it be one that is very well engineered.) I'll probably sell the Precision 7770 and that will make up for much of the expense of buying the MacBook. I'm quite familiar with macOS, I used to work with it professionally, so I feel like I know what I am getting in to. Unlike Linux, nearly all of the apps that I want are available on macOS. I thought about holding out for Framework, I am very interested in the direction that they are going. But, it'll probably be a few years yet before they deliver what I want (larger system with a 4K-or-better display that can hold multiple SSDs in addition to a dGPU) and even then there is the fact that I'd have to run either Windows or Linux on it, neither of which I seem to want. Up above, I gave three reasons why I felt like macOS is a non-starter, which I will address: MacBook keyboard layout. Well, since switching to Linux I have been trying out a different keyboard layout, leaving "num lock" turned off and using the home/end/pgup/pgdown buttons over there, and the top row of keys for numbers when I would normally use the keypad. (This is as opposed to remapping right alt/ctrl and F11/F12 keys to handle those functions, to make up for Dell's keyboard layout deficiencies.) It took a week or so but I adapted to it fine. So, I'm willing to try out using the Mac keyboard layout with no/few remappings. I think it'll be OK. No removable storage. Well, this is definitely disappointing. They offer 8TB which is not enough for me to have everything in one spot, which I would really like to have, but I think that I can make it work by also taking the large SSDs currently in my Precision and using them as NAS storage instead and that will hold my more "archival" stuff. Poor gaming library. ...I'm encouraged by recent activity in this area, both from CrossOver and also Apple's own new game porting toolkit, made available just earlier this month, which allows you to basically attempt to run any Windows game on macOS. People are reporting success running big games like Elden Ring. It might not be at the same spot as Linux+Steam+Proton is just yet, but its heading in the right direction with actual momentum which is good enough for me. I have no shortage of games to play that will work. Apple putting that toolkit out makes me think that they have no plans to pull Rosetta 2 away in the near future. Also, I do a fair amount of console emulation and each of the big emulators of recent Nintendo consoles (yuzu/Ryujinx/Cemu) have made big strides over the past year-ish in getting a proper macOS version off of the ground. Older stuff will work fine in RetroArch which I am already familiar with from using it on both Linux and Windows. I'm also planning to heavily leverage the Homebrew repos and casks to have a Linux-esque package management experience. Some work that I did in Linux to manage process priority/affinity/etc. will translate pretty easily to macOS. I'm already somewhat in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone/Apple Watch) so the ability to tie those products together more seamlessly is also nice. I'll install the ARM version of Windows in VMware Fusion for the odd case where I need to use a Windows app not available on macOS. I'm excited to see how this goes. But that will be a story for a different thread (...if I even go into it here). [Edit] Order is in...

Sigh. Very disappointed in the lack of "precision" with regards to this new display enclosure + panel that I received. It is a refurbished part — clearly labeled as such on the packaging. That made me nervous out of the gate. First off, it was completely covered with very sticky plastic stuff that I had to pull off. I was worried that I was going to damage the display just by doing that. I fire it up and the first thing I noticed were visible bits of adhesive glue stuff sticking up from inside of the bottom bezel edge. Now, I was wondering about the attention to detail given by whoever put this refurb together. I removed the bezel and pulled those off without much trouble. The next thing that I noticed was that the bottom few rows of pixels are covered up by the plastic bezel. The screen is mounted too low in the enclosure. It was also slightly worse on the right side. I could scoot the mouse cursor along the bottom of the screen — on Linux, at least with my cursor, maybe six pixels stick up out of the bottom when I do this — on the left edge, I could only see two pixels of the cursor, and it would "disappear" as I moved it over towards the right. Pulling up the corner of the bezel, I could see what I expected in the corner of the screen, and it would be covered up as soon as I snapped the bezel back on. I pulled the bezel off entirely to see if anything could be done about that. Unlike previously, this one does not have visible adhesive pull-tabs so I couldn't try to remount it even if I wanted to (...which I don't...), without some prying or heating that might damage the display. I tried to see if I could nudge the display panel up slightly but it would not budge. There was also a substantial backlight bleed / pressure issue in one spot along the top but that was resolved after removing the bezel and snapping it back on, like last time. I also spotted backlight spilling out of the bottom of the enclosure and shining on the bottom left hinge. That was resolved by pulling up that bit of the bezel and putting some black electrical tape in place to stop the bleed. Despite the issues, after doing the work described above I ended up completely satisfied with the panel, other than the issue with the bottom rows of pixels being covered by the plastic bezel ... which I would treat as a deal-breaker. Before calling Dell to complain, I decided to check and see if I could manipulate the bezel into snapping on in a different way. I started by bending the bezel's plastic tabs a little so that it could mount in a slightly lower position, and I had some success fixing the bottom corners in this way. ...As I was working towards fixing the bottom-center, messing with the bezel too much eventually did me in. The display stopped working. I must have jostled the display-side of the eDP cable in the wrong way when pulling off the bottom edge — there is a lot of adhesive there and it tends to get stuck to the silver tape stuff that is on the bottom of the panel and the eDP cable runs right behind that. I put the old display back in and it works, but it still looks like there is a tiny bug stuck in the screen. So, Dell is sending a replacement display panel again. A shame, because this panel doesn't appear to have any pixel issues or actual defects on the display itself, and once I pulled the bezel off and snapped it on again once it had pretty uniform backlight with no bleed or pressure spots on the edges that I could see. It was a good one. I feel a little bad about messing with it to the point of breaking it and then having Dell replace it a second time at their expense ... but not too much, really, since I wasn't going to keep a panel with the bottom portion covered by the bezel anyway, and because I don't at all mind taking Dell to task for issues caused by what I believe to be a bad design choice in this system. If I could swap out the panel only as in past Precision systems then I would probably have ordered a replacement panel myself rather than going through warranty support to replace it over a "minor" display issue. I was already considering buying my own mini-LED panel to try out before I found out that the panel alone is a non-replaceable part because of the adhesive. They won't let me do a "parts only dispatch" a second time for the same issue, so I'll be having a tech install it this time. I will be sure to have him stay until I do a full examination of the display and have him document any issues that I spot, with a copy of Dell's pixel policy on hand. At least, I didn't have much trouble installing the PTM7950 stuff. I watched a couple of videos ahead of time and I did stick it in the fridge for a while. I ordered a 8×4cm pad. I cut off a 2×4cm strip and that was enough to cover both the CPU and GPU, so I have enough here for four total attempts. I didn't have time to do temperature testing but at least I could tell that the system was not trying harder than normal to cool itself off. Since I had to repaste again to put the old display panel back on, I'm just using the ordinary paste that Dell provided for now. (...Looking back, I should have done a quick job with the Dell paste and only applied the PTM7950 after I was sure that I liked the display.) [Edit] Looks like the panel will be available to ship today, so hopefully a tech can come out on Monday.

New post on the Framework Laptop 16 chassis design & manufacturing process. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---enclosure

Huh, maybe I will give GPU C-states another try.

There's rather limited space for direct uploads. You can see what you have posted and your quota here: https://notebooktalk.net/attachments/ I find it best to just host images externally. OneDrive is easy enough (use the "Embed" option in the web UI to get a URL to an image that you have uploaded). If you paste a URL to an image in the compose box here, it will automatically be converted to an in-line picture.

Display panel issue. Again! No idea why this suddenly popped up. (I'm sure I would have noticed it quickly so it hasn't been around for long.) (Dark spot in the middle of the circle here, not quite centered.) I think it's not stuck pixels but rather some kind of display defect. It seems to be "behind" the pixel grid and moves around slightly if I change my viewing angle. I was a bit bummed because the dark pixel guideline is more loose than the bright pixel guideline (I had a bright pixel last time), requiring six messed up pixels to qualify for an automatic replacement rather than just one. So, I was prepared to get some grief about that from the tech. But, I measured it and found that it does cover six pixels, so there should be no reason for them not to replace it. Call me persnickety, but I do have sensorimotor OCD and this sort of thing is very bothersome once I notice it. I called Dell tech support and the tech agreed to replace the display. (...I had to talk him out of replacing the graphics card instead???) I asked for parts only this time so I'll do the replacement myself and won't have to worry about scheduling a tech. (I'm going to be traveling soon, so if there is a parts delay that could lead to a scheduling headache like I ran into when having the panel replaced last year.) My last two parts for this laptop faced weeks-long shortages. I wonder if I will actually get this one to me tomorrow... @Ionising_Radiation Have you been liking the Honeywell PTM7950 pad thing? Since I have to take off the heatsink to replace the display enclosure, I'll have to repaste so I'm thinking about trying this if it actually works decently... [Edit] (One hour later) At this moment, it is looking like both the display and the PTM7950 pad will be here tomorrow. [Edit 2] (Seven hours later) It's on the way, FedEx has picked up the display panel with estimated delivery of tomorrow.

I don't know if there was a NVPCF error in Device Manager beforehand, but I can say that disabling the NVPCF device from safe mode was enough to allow the system to boot normally.

I think all of the displays are IPS at this point, other than the Precision 7670/7680 OLED display, so I guess they don't bother specifically stating it.

Immediately at boot.

Only Windows 10 systems here. Experienced the BSOD on two of them (so far).

BIOS update warning. The nvpcf.sys BSOD from earlier rears its head. I had a coworker upgrade the BIOS today and then got stuck in a BSOD loop. Fixing it required going to safe mode, disabling the NVIDIA Platform Controllers & Framework device, and then installing an older NVIDIA driver. Too late to check now but I suspect turbo boost 3.0 was enabled which is what was "saving" him from the BSOD before the BIOS update was applied. If you have Intel Turbo Boost Technology 3.0 enabled, I would suggest that you try disabling it before applying the BIOS update and make sure that your system can boot up without a BSOD.

I think the BIOS update effectively disabled that option and removes the option to enable it again, so you should be fine if you already have it disabled; it will be basically no change for you.

P4000 is an 8GB card. P5000 is 16GB.

It can be an issue if you want to use that drive in some sort of RAID or other "combination" setup; often you'll not be "allowed" to include a drive that is showing a SMART warning and you might have to jump through hoops to work around that.

Normally the touchscreen glass is not easily separable from the panel; the glass, digitizer, and display panel are adhered together. You'd probably have to replace the entire display enclosure with panel included.

The physical connector is the same but the pinout is not the same. Framework is using a custom pinout. It is not expected that any Dell DGFF GPUs will work in this thing.

...Is there some rule that you have to put games on the app store if they are converted with this toolkit? There are lots of Mac programs & games distributed outside of the app store. They could just distribute through Steam like they do with the Windows version.

Framework Laptop 16 will feature swappable rear modules. It's not really MXM, they are using a customized DGFF connector, but it will allow for either a discrete GPU or extra battery to be installed. They have not yet given details for what types of modules will be available at launch. (We can assume that dGPU will be there, but anything else is up in the air.) ...I am sort of thinking that swapping them won't be as easy as just pulling one module out and snapping in another. They use a DGFF connector on the motherboard side, so you'll probably have to snap out the keyboard and remove a couple of screws on the motherboard side holding the DGFF connector in place before a module can actually be removed.

Today, Framework released details on the power adapter for Framework Laptop 16, which will be 180W. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---180w-power-adapter Some tidbits I saw: Under high load with a dGPU in play, the system can draw from battery power to push total power use above 180W. Framework Laptop 16 supports 240W over USB-C, and while Framework will not be providing such a power adapter, you can source your own and use it with this system. (You can also order the system without a power adapter at all, if you plan to do that.) The cables on both sides of the "brick" can be unplugged/replaced.