dingdongitsabear

I am unfamiliar with the current state, my experiences are from a couple of years ago. I had problems with ubuntu-specific installs, ppas and the like, stuff broke easily on upgrades; that's possibly not an issue anymore on account of flatpaks.

my biggest turnoff was that the default apps had their distinct look whereas 3rd party apps looked different. add to this the occasional QT app and the cacophony was too much to bear.

granted, but they are inextricably linked and you have to consider the software that does or doesn't allow you to utilise said hardware.

like, I've waited years for kernel devs to catch up to the proprietary hardware in my 2-in-1, namely the drivers for the ipu3 cameras. they are now obsolete and the focus is on ipu6 models. kinda important if you want this to be your main device.

and as to software, it's important to note that the touch-friendliness was an afterthought, so it isn't propagated through the system. like, in Gnome's own system settings app, you can't initiate dropdowns with touch! that's a pretty significant UI element that's been around since forever. another common stumbling block is initiating "right-clicks" on elements, by long-pressing stuff; sometimes it works, other times not. the on-screen keyboard usually appears when an input is focused, but it doesn't often enough that it's annoying.

speaking of, Gnome's OSK is only somewhat usable (and less so if you're on a non-US layout). if you're used to Android or iOS keyboards, it's pretty basic. however bad that is, Plasma's maalit keyboard makes Gnome's look like advanced alien tech, it's broken on so many levels you're better off disabling it. I didn't follow development in the past year or so, but one default "feature" of Gnome OSK was that it remembers everything you type - that includes passwords! - and helpfully offers them on the suggestion strip, with no way of turning it off!

obviously, the OSKs don't work if you need to unlock your disk on boot and I'm not sure they work on the login/lock screen; someone please correct me if I'm misremembering.

OK, screw OSKs, you're gonna use the cover keyboard. except, it's prone to just not work half the time. then you rip it apart (pardon, you disconnect it) and attach it again to have it working, maybe.

you're used to reading stuff, books, comics, whathaveyous, for hours. well, those screens aren't super power-efficient and the batteries aren't humongous either. plus, that thing is heavy and thick (easily twice my Samsung Tab) so maybe don't hold it up ABOVE YOUR FACE WHILE LYING DOWN - ask me how I know! speaking of screens, they aren't the greatest - try scroll-flinging a long page and watch this stuttering-flashing mess; you're gonna need new eyes if you keep this up.

I tried to make one work as a 3-in-1 solution. why have a desktop, a laptop, and tablet when I can have a single device and forego the constant copying and syncing and stuff. semi-decent specs, i5, 16 GB, 500 GB NVMe more than enough for my needs, so I got me a USB-C Dock, attached a huge 4K monitor, LAN, sound, mechanical keyboard, mouse... when I'm needed in the field, just detach it and off I go with all my shit on the drive AND I got a free iPad out of the deal, I just have to marvel at how smart I am!

yeah, nah. bottom line, they are bad as desktop replacement (throttled all over the place on account of anaemic cooling + whiny fan holler), bad as a laptop (on account of the kickstand, you hafta use it on a desk only, plus the keyboard is pretty bad and so is the tiny touchpad) and very bad as tablet (for reasons galore, some mentioned above).

so, like I said, as a fun project to play with - by all means, it's super fun trying out different OSs/apps (I haven't touched on Waydroid, Android x86, FydeOS, note-taking apps, etc.) but, as a daily driver, one that your livelihood and/or education depends on - hard pass.

kinda like trillian in the olden days... not sure all them proprietary services are gonna let 'em use their platforms though.

what they said. surfaces are serviceable to a degree (battery and SSD, screen replacement) even though they're glued shut, but in the sense "this is a fun project to do at a leisurely pace", not "I got shit to do with it tomorrow, clock is ticking".

Dells are way more serviceable, they got screws and easily accessible components instead of cement glue from hell. if you're going that way, make sure the camera sensors are supported, ipu3/6 camera support is spotty.

install something debian-like and then try jellyfin-mpv-shim and then add macast. you're creating a sink that plays whatever you send it via your mobile device. so, no interface on the tv to navigate, you browse your jellyfin library from your phone and just send it to the player. you control the playback from the mobile app (play, stop, volume, change subs, etc). behind the scene it uses mpv to play the video.

macast does the same for online videos e.g youtube, vimeo, etc. you send it a youtube video and it plays it in fullscreen. behind the scenes it uses yt-dl with mpv.

there are no good linux tablets, for any price; by "good" I mean it works as good as an Android or iOS tablet. everything is from not-as-good to way worse and there are things that are downright unusable.

whichever platform you choose (Gnome, Plasma or any of the derivatives like Phosh, Plasma Mobile, etc.) the experience beyond the first 15 minutes (hey, this actually works!) is pretty bad. it's certainly not usable as a main device that you depend on and use for actual work; as a dicking-around kinda project, sure, have at it.

before you spend that kind of money, my recommendation is to get an older Surface Pro or Dell Latitude 2-in-1 in the $150-200 range and see if that functionality is something you can live with. those can be had with up to 16 GB on-board and the SSDs are replaceable (Dells are more serviceable). kernel support is spotty, not all of the features work for all devices, mainly cameras and such; consult the linux-surface github.

edit: just saw this comment, my experiences are similar. the rest of the comments where people think what a device might work like you should disregard.

it's completely random and incongruent with anything that is or isn't happening. same game (Starcraft 2 and Far Cry 5 are currently in rotation) runs fine and then it just doesn't. yesterday launched SC2, played it for a while, everything is butter smooth. left it open to go make dinner. started a new game after like 15 mins - choppy, drops to 15 fps, horrible. played a couple rounds this morning - everything back to normal. and so on.

no huge temp spikes, no huge CPU loads, nothing I can pin down as correlated. both games are well within the capabilities of both CPU and GPU. I have C-states and Cool & Quiet disabled, so it's nothing power-throttling related.

I don't like rebooting, got way too much stuff open all the time, I do that maybe once a month; the rest is just suspend in the evening and wake in the morning.

there's a significant portion of software provided only via the App Store with no independent download from the vendor available. granted, you can get most stuff with direct download and macports/brew but there is stuff out there that forces you to sign in.

telemetry that's baked in along with the global Apple network that you're involuntarily part of (that's how random airtags/find-my-shit work) should be deal breakers for anyone.

no experience with this game but performance drops happen frequently and randomly for me, Fedora, Lutris, AMD GPU. like, I play a game that I have 100+ hours played on the same hardware and software and everything is dandy - 60 FPS, butter smooth mouse and game play. next day, same game, same settings, no updates in the meantime, absolutely nothing changed - 25 FPS, mouse stutters, horror. next day everything is fine, and so on.

mergerfs combines all those drives/mounts/etc into one. so if you have e.g. "Movies" folders on two drives, the new one has one "Movies" folder with the combined contents of those two drives. when writing to this array, the files are stored where there's (more) space. so searching stuff recursively is simple.

needless to say, there is no redundancy so if a drive dies, its conent is gone from the array.

I'm really sorry for reiterating this, but what you wrote also implies that movies that weren't on any list will also be deleted (don't want that), along with the movies that were on a list and now aren't (do want that). do you have first-hand experience with this?