I’m thinking about buying a small budget notebook with a touchscreen for university and running a resource friendly Linux distro on it to extend battery life (and also bc windows and Google suck ass). since I’m pretty much out of my depth here: does that make sense at all? are there noob friendly Linux distros available that support touch screen/ flippable notebooks. and if so, would it also make sense to buy a lenovo chromebook rather than a windows 11 based notebook? thanks in advance!

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    25·
    4 days ago

    Yeah. If you pay a few dollars for a product key from one of those grey market sites (legally dubious but there’s no danger to you) you can get Windows 11 IoT LTSC which is a version of Windows without all the crap that people complain about.

    I’ve been running that on my desktop for a while and the only problem I ran into was that Winget doesn’t work by default and it is quite a pain to get working (I did manage in the end but it involved downloading some core windows file from a random windows help website which isn’t ideal).

    The only reason I needed it is because OCaml is only distributed on Windows with Winget. I think the Windows Store also probably doesn’t work (never tried) but that’s a bonus. Same for the Windows game bar, whatever that crap is. (Steam and games themselves work fine.)

    Other than that it’s rock solid and a nice improvement over Windows 10. It can even install printers quickly and reliably which I thought I would never see in my lifetime (Linux still can’t).