Crozekiel

In my experience with them, MSI laptops tend to run quite hot in general, your OS probably isn’t going to fix it. You can try one of those laptop cooling plates, basically a mesh platform with fans, ensuring cool air is always available to the laptop intakes, but it isn’t exactly a perfect solution.

Really it just needs more cooling capacity - they seem to cut razor close to the amount needed in their designs so when eventually cooling becomes less efficient either through fans getting tired/clogged or thermal paste/pads breaking down, it will not keep up.

I think the biggest problem with Linux is that a lot of self-proclaimed “savvy” computer users need to check their ego… It’s either people that have used Linux since 2008 and want to gate-keep the community because their superiority complex is a poorly built house of cards; or it’s people that have only ever used modern windows and think they are good with a computer that went and tried to install Linux and screwed it up because it didn’t work exactly like windows.

Average computer users aren’t comfortable installing windows and do not feel like they can fix it if something goes wrong…

This is really and truly terrible all around. Firstly, its a link to a website talking about a post on Lemmy… Why the hell is this just not a post? Why do we need an external website for this terrible excuse for “an article”? Secondly, the writing is terribly done with poorly reasoned arguments and a lot of just plain wrong information. It is yet another example of someone that tried switching to Linux once, sucked at it, and decided that everyone here in the Linux communities must just be lying about having no issues using linux and they should come here to the Linux communites to tell us to stop and we can’t do what we already do every damn day. Jesus, it seems like half of the posts in any Linux community on Lemmy is people that don’t use Linux telling everyone how bad Linux is and how great windows is… wtf guys.

KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)

and then…

if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.

lol. I love it. :P

To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.

Wild, you are like from the alternate universe where Linux is dominant and nerds play around in windows. Are things better where you are from? :P

I’d bet it is a typo stating ddr5, not on the CPU model. 8GB sticks of ddr5 are rare enough to find as singles, and 4gb sticks basically don’t exist - makes more sense if it is a DDR3 system. Plus, the GT 730 is basically only barely a graphics card, a lot of them are Fermi based chips (like gt 400 series from 2010)… They are dirt cheap video output for a machine that otherwise wouldn’t have any video out, but they get packaged by less than honest companies/people with other old hardware and marketed as “gaming computers” all the time unfortunately.

Ubuntu is not the limiting factor to this machine gaming, unfortunately. It is going to be choking itself on basically any games from the last 10 years :(

Is it possible to do something like this that can be left on 100% of the time, with some sort of USB pass-through for further connectivity and charging? Or is that too asking too much of the board?

I’d recommend looking up Ventoy and getting a big thumb drive (like 64gb or so). Then you can download several different distro live images and put them all on one flash drive and try them all out in a live environment. It isn’t 100% the experience you’ll get running it installed on the machine, but you can get a decent feel for each distro to see what you like and what you don’t without having to keep track of 5-10 different flash drives.

Your suggestion for what he should use instead of Signal, is Signal??

Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed

This is probably the thing that irks me the most about it. Most everything I open remembers where it was last time I opened it and just goes there. So I only have to decide once where and how big I want a window to be, generally. I don’t want that to be contextually different depending on what else is open the vast majority of the time either, so I don’t want to fight with my DE over where and how big a window should be.

I don’t know, to each their own I suppose. Tons of people seems to like Gnome, so I don’t want to hate on it… But it feels like they are making a DE for people that don’t want to learn to use a computer, people that have mostly only used tablets and phones, or people that want the device to make the decisions for them… Which doesn’t sound at all like the people that are switching to or already using Linux. I don’t know, I have to assume I am just missing the magic something that Gnome provides to others.

it’s not like you are looking anywhere ense when you open windows start

That’s just not true, at least in my experience. I typically use the search box to open what I am looking for, and frankly would be very annoyed if I had to switch to something that takes over my entire screen to do that. I don’t even have to do that on my phone, and that is my biggest complaint with Gnome is that it looks and feels like they are trying to make a mobile interface first, not a PC interface. And if I have to browse for something, I do still much prefer a small organized menu to something filling my entire screen. I’m on an ultra-wide screen, I don’t want to have to physically turn my head to see the entire list. Maybe this makes sense on very small screens but that circles me back around to feeling like Gnome is meant for a tablet and not my desktop PC.

Clearly we all have different ideas and work flows that we like, and that’s fine. I’m very happy there are alternatives to Gnome as I’ve hated it every time I’ve tried it; but, obviously there are a lot of people that like what they are doing. I just probably won’t ever understand those people.

omg i’ve been in this rabbit hole trying to get a friend’s laptop working right for the last 2 weeks… I found the name of the thing you are talking about, where the dGPU HAS to talk to the integrated graphics to get to the laptop screen… and then promptly forgot it after getting so mad at such a stupid idea and when I went to google it again to find articles i had previously read I couldn’t find it. :(

It’s weird for gaming, depending on the game, because there is SO much in the periphery of your vision, but for productivity stuff its great (its basically 2 monitors stuck together with no bezel in the middle). I actually originally bought it solely for Eve Online… With one normal monitor before, you have so much stuff on your screen that you NEED to see roaming low or null space that you don’t get to see your pretty space ship hardly at all. But with ultrawide, there’s room for both needed UI elements as well as pretty space views.

I still can’t get used to it for first person games though, and if the game isn’t well setup for ultrawide the FOV can feel pretty screwy. It looks awesome, but you run around for 10 minutes and you start to wonder why you can’t see anything and then realize it is because your lunch is on the screen… (at least for me, lol)

With a 27" monitor, I feel like there’s enough space

*looks at the second monitor I bought because the 49" ultrawide “wasn’t enough space”…

I might be ignoring some useful features… sips tea

Is Arch like the linux version of being Vegan? ie the running joke is people using Arch can’t get through a conversation without mentioning it? I feel like I’ve see basically a carbon copy of this comment on so many posts about Linux I’m wondering if there’s an “in joke” there I am missing, lol.