I got a thinkpad E14 off of eBay for $400. There was a slight haircrack in the hinge, but it came with 40gb of ram 1tb ssd and amd ryzen 7730u I believe. I always recommend looking on eBay first, it’s likely you can find a $1000+ laptop for $400 like I did.

Yea I’m trying out tuta it supposidly is end to end encrypted. My hope is that I’ll take a look at it, and see if I like it. It does have RSA encryption so from my preliminary testing it is believable.

My god, yes. Just yesterday I stopped using duckduckgo since even that has now become increasingly infuriating with AI. I’m using this search engine with no AI it’s based on database queries and to go to a specific website there is a small tab you can use. I love it because now I get to appreciate and use textbooks (whereas i would have chatGPT’d it) because of how limited the queries are and the limited selection. It’s not like google where it dumps the most relevant information at the top, you have to search for it. Anyways, if you were wondering it’s called marginalia search.

I unironically said this in my group chat, “proton mail is becoming more and more sketchy as being a privacy focused mail service” just like how signal is becoming more sketchy as a instant message service. There are things proton mail does such as logging activity that shouldn’t be the case as a paying customer, and yet here we are. When I request privacy I want it to be private, as in don’t give my data to anyone. it seems for that to happen it must be community driven and decentralized.

Yea, I had a server with a nvidia GPU that was orginially on windows. I went with ubuntu, and the installed nvidia driver (when ubuntu asked to install any drivers) gave a horrendous aspect ratio that didn’t fill up the entire screen. I had to uninstall the driver to get it to work.

Came from windows laptop that I got about a year ago, before then I was running unironically chrome os. I liked chrome os for it’s Linux features. So when I did go from my Chromebook to a windows, it wasn’t as fun. I also didn’t like all the spyware on windows, and this was the time when I was removing myself from the internet as if I didn’t exist, So it was inevitable I would switch.

The only reason why I haven’t switched earlier is because I am a university student (currently in electrical engineering) and I was concerned that I would be given an exotic application that my laptop cannot support on Linux. Then I learned the majority of students have macbooks, so if it doesn’t work for me it doesn’t work for them too. That’s when I made the conscious decision to switch from windows to Linux.

Currently trying out fedora workstation, it is like the Mac os of Linux operating systems (and that’s a compliment).

I’ve been using fedora workstation for about a month now, you really can’t go wrong with it. It’s great for laptop, there are also ways to customize it to work with a desktop. I am running it on amd CPU/GPU, so i don’t know how well it works with nvidia and Intel, I know some distributions do a really poor job managing the drivers. I don’t use CAD, but I have done FPGA design and programming (C/C++) and it works great. Haven’t done much gaming, all I have is minecraft installed, I could imagine you can install steam on there as well. Hope this helps.

Madness. When I started using gdb in C it was lifesaver to find any runtime errors in my code. Coming from what is the shit of C compilation and runtime errors it saved what would effectively be hours of inserting printf statements to find the error.

It depends how well a language specifies where the runtime error is occuring. I just get “segmentation fault (core dumped)” as my runtime error which could mean any for loop or iterattive sequence in my program.

This is how it feels trying to merge a repo

I try to avoid it, but ever since search engines have gone to shit, it has forced me to use it for debugging code. Stack overflow, r/Cprogramming, minimal articles on the specific issue, have ceased to exist ever since AI generation. And why should it? Why would a user post an issue (for example, on stack overflow) wait for a few days to get a few responses, when they could get an instant response with AI. Search engines have gone to shit so much, that My fathers startup company has issued a premium license for chatGPT because of how dead Search engines are.

I hate it, I wish I didn’t have to use it, and yet this is my reality.

I used windows out of concern that my university may use an application unavailable on Linux (I’m an electrical engineering major) I shouldn’t have been since even if there isn’t, I could always use bottles/wine to get the .exe file.

You seriously can’t go wrong with the lenovo thinkpads on eBay. I Got a thinkpad E14 ryzen 7 (7th gen), 48gb ram, 1tb ssd for $400 on ebay with a small hair crack on the hinge.

At the end of the day, a laptop is a laptop, and the cost difference between a $2000 brand new laptop and a $400 used laptop there really is no argument/justification to be made to buy a $2000 laptop in less-intensive tasks. Here’s a better instance of your money: find a $400 laptop with semi-good performance (ryzen 3 or intel equivalent) put $1600 to a gaming computer and setup a virtual environment with a radeon or rtx gpu at your fingertips.