Well, I guess after looking it up, its actually ‘whaling on something’.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/usage-of-whale-wail-wale

I’ve got a fun one to share from my college programming professor. Similar situation, they had a machine that kept locking up, and this was back in the days of huge mainframes the size of rooms. So they call the repair tech from the manufacturer.

So the repair tech shows up to the office gets the run down on what’s been going on, and goes out to his car and brings in a huge piece of wood and just starts wailing on the thing as hard as he could. The whole office was freaking out thinking this guy had lost it, and he later explained that the memory was a grid of magnetic coils, and the coils would rust and the rust shavings would fall between the coils below, corrupting the memory bits. So he was shaking them loose by slamming the machine with this piece of wood. Lol wild times.

I’ve been clinging to my 10 year old Logitech diNovo Mini, but when this thing kicks the bucket dunno how I’m gonna replace it. Trackpad has been pretty good, and I like the fact that it turns off and is protected when the clamshell is closed so I don’t accidentally press stuff when it gets lost in the couch. We really need an open source mini keyboard so people can make their own and customize buttons, etc.

I mean, I always buy used business line laptops for about $400 each when I upgrade, but if I plopped down new $1500 pricing for a new laptop, I’d be a little upset if I broke the USB power port. Guess that’s just me though. I don’t like planned obselence, most people don’t seem to really think about that much I guess.

Am I the only one that thinks that USB-C power delivery is a con?

Having the option to charge with usb-c in a pinch is a really nice feature, but for longterm use I’d really rather usb-c plus a seperate barrel jack for power.

The barrel jacks on business line laptops are usually a separate module that if it breaks from catching the cord with your foot and ripping it out of the laptop, you can replace the module. I’m not sure I’ve really seen replaceable usb-c power jacks very commonly, they’re usually part of the motherboard because it’s a combined power delivery/thunderbolt port or something. Now if you rip the cord out the jack is totally fucked And you have to solder a new one on.

How’s the performance for media on that thing? I was eying up the surface go line to replace an android tablet that I mostly use for playing movies and TV shows I’ve downloaded. Think it would do okay playing back 1080p and higher content?

Sorry, still not understanding your position, can you explain a bit more about your troubles and problems? Then many of us here can help you.

Explain more, I don’t understand.

They have a Linux GUI, though admittedly I’ve never used it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html

Rufus, the bootable usb creator?

You should be able to natively do what Rufus does in Linux, if you have a disk imaging software installed. I think Ubuntu comes with gnome-disks, you right click an ISO file, click open with, select disk image writer, and select the destination device (your USB drive) and it writes the ISO file to the USB device. You should double check it actually makes it bootable, but I think it does.

You can also use Ventoy to do what you want. You install it to the USB drive and then just drop the ISO files into a folder that you want to boot from, and it creates a menu for you to choose which ISO file to choose at boot time.

I’m not sure I would agree for arch if the OP wants low maintenance. I’ve never run it myself, but the way I’ve heard arch described is the further you go without regular updates the more likely you are to have a problem when you do update.

Aren’t most app configurations and settings saved in the user’s .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?

/home/[username]/.config/

I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we’re just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script

sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc…

if we’re talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used