The laptop it’s replacing also bad just 256gb of storage.

I probably should somehow get rid of Windows 11. It doesn’t deserve to stay installed just because I might need it and have to reluctantly use it in 2027-2028. I’m not gonna change the partitioning system anytime soon unless the swap partition position is problematic.

I was looking for: Cheap, used, 1920p display, AMD CPU, 16gb RAM, presence of SSD, Linux bluetooth drivers, at least 2 USB ports, and a non-American brand. Storage capacity is something I’d only really care about on my gaming computer (or if I was still engaging in piracy).

I got this laptop

I guess I could reinstall Windows, I really hate the idea of running the Windows 11 installer though.

I’m not sure the refurbisher I got my laptop from even gave Windows a license key. It kept bugging me to create an account to fully activate it or something, I should boot into it to check but the thought of opening up Windows 11 just gives me the creeps.

Depends whether they’ll start using TPM in combination with kernel-level anti-cheat to ensure you don’t use AI in an exam or something. I don’t know what the future holds and barely understand what a TPM does.

I’m averse to installing things that don’t come with my distro. More software means more risk of a malicious update (which is the greatest security threat I face). Also seems a bit hacky so I’d be worried it’d cause instability. Plus I’m just not that technical.

I am afraid that in the future something I need will require Windows 11. Whether that be interacting with the government or maybe if I go back to university.

I should probably work out how to set up secureboot someday.

I’m only have about 20GB of files so I think I’ll be fine on space.

I’m keeping Windows 11 around in case I need it for … IDK taxes (though I don’t have secureboot enabled because [points to image above]). A VM won’t work for the Mint one, I need it separate for reasons I won’t go into.

Btrfs was installed in default but I only know how to do full-disk encryption on ext4. Apparently btrfs doesn’t have built-in support for it. I really liked how it was neatly organized into subvolumes but alas.

I was told I was missing H264 codecs but it’s 2025 so I doubt that’d have the effects I saw. I tried following the instructions to install them provided by OpenSUSE but some kinda dependency nonsense occurred with ffmpeg. Either way, I guess a rolling release isn’t for me.

I tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, that was a massive mistake (video codecs broken, froze whenever I tried to enter my password without changing from X11 to Wayland or vice versa (a theme was installed)).

Just reinstalled it with OpenSUSE Leap and at least the video codec issue is gone.

Did need to manually configure my disk partitions to get full OS encryption and now my partition table is a REAL mess.

RHEL, OpenSUSE, Devuan, Rocky Linux, ZorinOS, Knoppix, Debian, Mint, MX Linux, ElementaryOS, Kubuntu, etc.

When I’m looking for a distro (which I’m currently doing) my core concerns are:

• Comes with KDE Plasma pre-installed (or Xfce failing that, I may be better off with Xfce but I want to try KDE).
• That any money I’d give to the project would not end up in America.
• That any money I’d give to the project would go towards organization doing most of the dev work.
• Minimal software set to limit the chance of a malware-infected update.
• Gets critical security patches quickly, ideally as close to straight from the horses mouth as possible.
• Strong security by default, and a strong security culture.
• Monetizes the home user in some way.

EDIT: I went with OpenSUSE Leap (to replace OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which wasn’t working for me). Video encoding works properly now. Doesn’t meet all my conditions but probably nothing would.

Supporting Nazis with an utterly meaningless gesture to avoid being shut-down is far better than falling on your sword over the ability for Grindr users to say “no zionists” in their profile.

Probably to do with the bipartisan laws against criticism of Israel. Probably not the best hill for Grindr to die on so I think they made the right choice here.

I didn’t. And apparently you can’t without trying to short-circuit the motherboard. I just assumed, and assumed wrong.

I just tried to distro-hop and found my BIOS had been locked with a password. Assuming I didn’t set a password that I subsequently forgot (and that isn’t one of the many I have memorized), I figured this might have something to do with the age of the laptop (I have a HP 4540s). If certificate expiration is already affecting people then this might be it.

EDIT: I just forgot I set a password, and it took me 2 days to realize that I was stupid enough to have set the password that I used for everything when I was 12 years old.

As I understand it the TPM is for people who have physical access. It prevents them from cloning your disk.

I think with an adequately long password (or an adequately resource-intensive encryption algorithm) you can secure your disk enough to prevent unauthorized access. But the TPM would prevent them from removing your hard-drive and shunting it into a super-computer (so all password attempts wouldn’t need to be on the crummy 10-year old laptop CPU) so a TPM + password is more secure.

Most of the conspiracy theorists (and similar personality types) gravitate to Linux.

Oh I see, when you go straight to the Epic Games Store page it doesn’t have a download for Linux and doesn’t even say Linux is supported.

But that link says Red Hat Linux 8 or Rocky Linux 8, so OP should probably use Fedora or Rocky. Rocky’s a bit of a no-name though so forum support might be lacking.