To upgrade the UEFI or other hardware-level firmware you need a way to upgrade. Best OEMs use LFVS; good OEMs use have ISOs or bin files you can flash from UEFI; terrible OEMs lock that into a Windows-only executable.

In my case there was a fan & thermal update I was never able to get.

None.

I had a Razer laptop in the past when they were talking about being dev laptop forward & supporting Linux.

This never happened. Instead flashing Linux voids the warranty now, support drops you, & firmware upgrades only happen thru a green-accented genuine Microsoft Windows GUI installation (no *.bin flashing, no CLI FreeDOS support, no Windows PE).

Similar can be said of Guix

Xmonad. I prefer tiling window managers, & I tried Sway but I can’t do color work without proper color management… something Wayland doesn’t support. Thus, I moved back to my old Xmonad config awaiting Wayland to get its shit together after years saying color management was around the corner & distros still adopting it despite not being ready.

Why tho? The logs give you information & progress. After boot you don’t even see it.

I honestly wish Android booted like this.

Meanwhile folks I work with Linux is basically seen as a must (if not specifically NixOS). You are on your own if you want to use OSs that don’t work well with Nix since there is too much value in immutable builds to warrant supporting your proprietary setup. Most ended up switching to or getting a second laptop for Linux.

I mean that sounds like a them problem. Why would your setup, your ergonomics be influenced by others?

Yet Wayland is still working on proper color management… which doesn’t make it fit for professional work

The biggest shake-ups in a while outside we-don’t-use-X (no systemd, etc.) are the declarative distros like NixOS & Guix. You do the whole system setup & config thru a single file (or broken into multiple). Learning curve is very high for the config but the payoff is less things changing out from under you & setting up new machines & rolling back to working states without resorting to FS snapshots. They are good languages to learn for software development too where you want repeatable software.

I stopped after 7 🤷

The last week 10 was an easy, free upgrade, I upgraded then gave the machine to a friend to do some very, very early LLM training to never see it again.

Vista all over again?

LoL is addicting & sucks your soul out; Roblox does this while making child labor on their platform on how the games are built & monetized inside their platform. It is pretty gross.

I am happy Arcane is good tho. Knowing the characters makes it a more fun & engaging. They built some good art & lore.

When I left for Linux I had to give up League of Legends. I sucked it up, & after a month, I was fine without it & it was better since I knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort even trying to install it on Linux.

One reason for moving to Nix was declarative config so at least that part of my system is a series of Nix files to build into a working setup.

…The rest… let’s just say “needs improvement” & I would like to set up a NAS.

They are probably fine but you should pick up a pair of nice wired headphones for when the battery dies & can no longer hold a charge.

Wild. I used sway for the first time with Nix since I could rollback a misconfiguration.

Any on your shortlist for picking up?

.NET is such a second-class citizen (Mono situation looks shaky now) on non-Microsoft Windows. I mean don’t give it up cold turkey perhaps, but adding new languages to your belt will help you get unshackled from Microsoft.

Happy I switched to NixOS to solve this issue for myself