The only issues I had with Laptops so far were the WIFI drivers, as some distros, such as Debian, don’t have them OOTB. I think especially the major players with a focus on recent patches however, such as fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch and many others can install them rather easily during the installation.
I had this problem at work a week ago or so, at least with Fujitsu PCs. For them, the main cause isn’t an empty CMOS battery, but rather that Fujitsu generally had too little BIOS cache, since there is nothing about it in the UEFI standard. The update basically overfilled that cache, rendering the BIOS completely unusable. The POST doesn’t even go through fully.
The PC are sort of bricked, you gotta put the mainboard into recovery mode, put the ROM file on a freeBSD formatted stick and wait until you see instructions on the screen. Follow them, restart the PC. I recommend setting the BIOS to the optimized default settings, as not doing that might make the boot of Windows pretty slow in some cases. I did hear that it can delete the keys from the TPM, but I haven’t seen that with my PCs at work.
I do like the hooks on Display Port, honestly. There were quite a few times where HDMI cables came loose while adjusting my screen due to the cable being tied together with other cables for organisational purposes. Putting it back in always a chore then.
I don’t think it is even much of a hassle when unplugging it from a machine, such as a PC. I do agree it’s a pain for monitors however, as the ports usually are in a more indented position.
Generally during the mounting process, which is pretty early on at the OS boot process.
Yeah, that’s a risk. However you’ll always risk having leftovers from programs, even when continuing to use an OS, simply because you might switch programs, the developer rethinks where they store the config files, etc…
In most cases these files are relatively small and won’t be very noticeable in the long run. However if that still bothers you have no other choice but to cleanup your config files regardless.
Also, those config files are generally only for your own user, i.e. user-related configurations, not program-dependent ones. System configs are generally stored outside the user profiles.
Honestly, I’d argue it depends on the use case. A lightweight distro meant for basic tasks will never consume as much as a gaming one. Factoring in that your snapshots will naturally grow over time (and thus disk space) will mean that repartitioning, and getting bigger hard drives, is always a thing.
I’d still just trust the general installation guide, if it offers automatic partition allocation. Just only do partitions for /boot, / and /home, I’ve never found much use for /var /log and such as a separate partition, at least as a home user.
And when in doubt: use LVM with ext4 for dynamic partitions. BTRFS has a similar feature, but it’s still experimental, and thus potentially unstable.
I recommend making your /home a separate partition. It makes switching distros easier and also allows you to not encrypt your installation and only your own files, saving you from the headache in the case LUKS doesn’t work properly anymore.
I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
I do get that one wants to be careful when it comes to viruses, but just outright not believing others without doing your own research is just as harmful as blindly believing in something. If you don’t have precautions against websites running malicious code (e.g. ublock origin), you’re already treading on dangerous ground regardless. Doubly so if you don’t make snapshots.
If you really want to be paranoid you can also click the link inside a USB image, or a sandbox. I would however advise doing research on winehq.org if you are running Linux, since it’s generally a good resource for running Windows apps.
What I experienced is that Snaps/Flatpaks that contain X11 apps will behave very oddly in a Wayland sessions, at least with NVidia GPUs.
Using distros that still use X11, like Linux Mint, seems to help a lot.
One thing I will commend Snaps/Flatpak for however is bundling dependencies, especially deprecated ones. I spent DAYS trying to install an older version of .NET framework that’s no longer supported to get a game (Vintage Story), but to no avail. With the appropriate Snap/Flatpak it worked first try, well, once I found the distro that doesn’t have the X11 problem that was previously stated.
Generally I think immutable distros are the best entry-level distros for newcomers. Stops people from accidentally bricking their system.