The Post Ninja
Leave it as is. Some people go tin foil hat about Secure Boot being insecure, but that’s like saying “don’t lock the bottom lock on your door because someone can use a lockpock in 2 seconds”.
Fedora works fine and automatically with Secure Boot, and that is an important defense against on-boot malware injection.
Latitude is my rec, not XPS. IDK why the XPS always seems to have issues.
As for “stupid hybrid graphics”, my HP Gaming 15 is a few years old now and still kicking… AMD/nVidia GTX dual graphics. Only reason I had to replace a board was because the heatsink wasn’t attached properly from the factory.
And yes, it is a linux laptop too.
DELL Latitude laptops. They’re designed for work, come with repair guides from DELL, and have upgradeability. The 5310 is one of the longest-lasting laptops for battery life you can get for $200-300 on ebay (over 8 hours battery video streaming, I’ve done this) that still has half decent specs (16-64GB RAM, NVMe SSD upgradeable, i5 10th gen)
Runs fine on Debian Stable
Remember kids, whatever Linux Distro you installed, it’s the wrong one…
Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…
GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.
Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.
Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.
So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.
RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.
Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.
As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.
Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.
While I run straight Fedora on some of my systems now, I do agree the Atomic versions are a boon for stability.
Used to use Ubuntu and Mint for desktops, but they are a bit too vintage with the kernel and package versions, and everything is moving very fast with Wayland replacing X11 and lots of kernel driver improvements for modern hardware (especially AMD hardware), so being on Fedora is the next best thing to the bleedingest edge Arch when it comes to uptodateness.