I see, it’s less likely if there is a surge protector (unless surge protector is faulty or older than 5 years). Worth a shot since that happens here a lot.

I saw the FFmpeg test as someone suggesting. That’s a good advice. Addition to that run powertop to see how is the power consumption. There is also Phoronix Test Suite that you can use for different benchmarks, might be helpful.

Probably not but surely will leave a dent on console market.

I would say apricot.

I’m using Linux for more than a decade (including Mint) and never had a hardware failure because of it, had 2 GPUs died on me because of power shortages though.

Anyway, I believe those are more likely a coincidence because older they get it’s more likely they die because of age, especially for PSUs. And PSUs die almost without any indications. However 3 PC is a lot, but I would suspect unstable electricity before that.

It’s also possible that motherboard is dead instead of PSU. And if they’re laptops, I think this is a better possibility. It’s easier to check if they are not laptops.

No surprise there!

Then they sell useless OOTB laptops. Those laptops desperately need Linux (or BSD).

And they sell laptops with 4 GB RAM and pre-installed Windows 11 here. No idea how they work. :)

I have a similar machine from 2011, though it’s x64 >> Samsung N150P. I used it as a typewriter for a couple years and I can suggest the same for you if you have such interests. However later I turned it into a homeserver and currently it serves as Pi-hole, Jellyfin, syncthing etc. Without x64, server might be tough but typewriter wouldn’t mind. For general daily stuff, it’s not really useful.

Heh, onlu rule in English: Memorize them all!

Thanks for the link. Explains why I never heard of it, it’s more or less useless. Though English spelling has many problems, not just this.

Can anyone explain what’s “i before e”?

I tried on mine and seems fine.

No problem!

Yeah, it took me kinda long to find about it as well. By the way, if you decide to install it, don’t forget to also install a GUI for it, something like iwgtk for example. Good luck!

It is indeed a pain to use on Linux. We have a similar (maybe the same) Macbook Air and recently I had to deal with the same thing to make it usable. I have tried many different distros, and most of the time I had to install the broadcom-wl driver via phone-tethering. Installing or even using dkms version is not the only problem too, the driver is also awful. The distro I settled was LMDE, surprisingly it was the only distro that came with Broadcom drivers, which was a plus at first. However it deteriorated so fast as you described, I had to find a permanent solution. My solution was completely ditching broadcom-wl drivers in favour of Intel’s iwd driver.

iwd also has performance issues time to time, but at least disabling/re-enabling it solves the issue, unlike had to restart the Macbook with broadcom-wl.

I also tried to replace the Broadcom Wi-Fi module by opening the back cover of Macbook since I had a Wi-Fi card laying around, but sadly the one on Macbook was not a nowadays’ standard M2 unit, so couldn’t done it.

I see. Those indeed are not possible on Wayland, at least not the way that was on Xorg. KDE has a built-in tool like xprop but I don’t know if it can be used on its own other than running it via KDE settings (There is Detect window properties option under Window rules.)

From my own experience, using global keys was quite a hassle. I have found some workarounds to some but it’s still an open issue for me. Wayland has changed how a lot things work and I believe there will be solutions or at least workarounds to all Xorg tools in time, maybe with something like Flatseal but for Wayland but main issue which is security remains, so I don’t know how things will go.

Don’t know about the other things but “focus follows mouse” is possible on Wayland. Well, it’s possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.

What’s the pH of snake oil?

I see.

Thanks, I’ll check there.

Correction: Unplugging/plugging works (don’t know why it didn’t work previously). However, enable/disable doesn’t remember. When I press super+P and make the changes there it also doesn’t remember when switch back to dual monitor. Is this also an issue?

Technically all distros support Nvidia since it’s a kernel thing, however some of them have better out of the box experience, so it would be wiser to go with one of those distros. For gaming, it’s usually better to have more recent drivers, if you play different varieties of games and some of them are newer titles. Though depending on the games, even Debian could be a suitable option.

If you don’t want to learn under-the-hood features, Bazzite could be a nice option for you. If you want familiarity with Windows, you might want to go with KDE as your desktop environment. However don’t be afraid of trying new angles if you like the general idea of a distro. So Pop!_OS might look different than Windows, it’s also a solid distro.

If you’ll need Microsoft programs or some Windows-only programs, choose something you can install Winboat on it, which isn’t currently usable for Bazzite, until the devs bring Podman support for it. Know that, Winboat is not the only interface you can install Windows programs, it just makes things much easier. So depending on the programs, Bazzite still could be a good option for you.

People here seem to recommend Arch-based distros but I wouldn’t start with them, at least until you get some familiarity with Linux in general. There is no problem using them, but a beginner couldn’t handle if something goes wrong after an update (usually happens with Nvidia). It does not happen a lot, but even once is enough for people who can’t handle it.

There is nothing wrong with Linux Mint. You might find it quite straightforward. It does not have the latest Nvidia drivers most of the time but this might not be a problem for you. If you play newer titles though, then it’s probably not the distro you would want.