People loudly declaring they are switching to Linux feel to me like people loudly declaring they are leaving Twitter. That's nice? I've had my home machines on Linux since forever and it's fun. I like trying new distros about once a year to see what people are up to. It's been possible to run a basic setup for normies for a solid decade now, it's unfortunate that it took Microsoft waging UX war for some techies to notice.
I don't think your argument addresses the substance of the judge's opposition, which is that the law as proposed will apply to all apps and all websites, not just ones that might do harm. That does seem like genuine overreach, and it is not even likely that it's what Texans were really asking for in the first place. It's just a bad law.
If you're saying Texas is planning on gatekeeping the entire internet, it is indeed a bad law. But if they're simply giving themselves power to identify what is "bad" and require that site to age-verify, that isn't really a new power states are getting is it?
Author doesn't cite how they decided that only MacBook or Framework would fit their needs. I've never had trouble with Dell laptops with any Linux distro I cared about. If I wanted a powerful Linux laptop, I'd probably look at something like Dell's premium model:
I bought a few refurbished Dell laptops/desktops in recent years, and while older models hold fine, more recent models broke down quite easily within a year. Sure all of them are refurbished models (purchased through official website) that cost from $400 CAD to $800 CAD but I'm sketchy of the build quality of recent models.
What model did you buy? Was it a new one? I'm looking for anything that can live up to 5+ years. I have seen all kinds of issues, and the most frustrating thing is, most of the issues are small but deal-breaking.
My first laptop back in 2005ish or so was a Dell Latitude. Ran XP until Vista came out and I switch to Linux which it ran for a couple years until it was stolen from my car. I recall unimaginable pain and suffering due to wifi, which, IIRC, I side-stepped by buying replacing the stock Broadcom card with an Atheros card and I'm certain is not nearly much of an issue as it used to be.
I've had two Dell XPS laptops (a 13" 2015 model and a 15" 2-in-1 2018 model). Both had significant touchpad issues: not sure if that's a driver thing or a hardware thing, but both would sometimes act as if there was a phantom touch somewhere on the trackpad which messed with my actual input. One of them had a keyboard where key caps of frequently used keys (super, shift, ctrl) would split in two after a ~year of use; this was not fixed under warranty, I paid out of pocket after a year of ownership, another year later it happened again.
After those two Dell XPS laptops, I got a MacBook Pro 2021 with an M1 Pro instead of getting the keyboard fixed again. No issues. Linux support isn't great, but at least macOS is a relatively competent UNIX so it's fine.
I might consider another non-Mac laptop in the future. But it's not gonna be a Dell.
Mostly Arch Linux at the time, though I've had Elementary OS on it as well. I used to run i3 (and eventually Sway) on it, which worked well since I could have a keyboard-centric workflow and not rely o bc the trackpad.
Interestingly, the touch screen of the 2-in-1 worked really well! I often relied on the touch screen to do light web browsing when the trackpad was acting up.
I did briefly look into the XPS series but it seems this series isn't really a thing anymore? I also found a lot of comments describing recurring issues with the trackpad (or was it the keyboard? I can't remember). Basically it seemed like too much of a gamble.
I'm not a massive fan of the hardware or anything, but most Dell laptops (including this premium one I linked) are tested to work with Ubuntu. If you're ok to use an Ubuntu-derivative as your distro, you should almost always have that as an option. Much like the Framework, it should be easily returnable if you have an issue.
If your company demands/keeps buying the shittiest, cheapest plastic Dell laptops instead of XPSes or higher end Latitudes/Precisions, that's not Dell's fault.
My company uses XPSes and Precisions. They work great.
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