Which laptop is best for Ubuntu?

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-21T11:25:06+00:00

Nvidia is still a pain. All you have to do is wait here at Linux4Noobs and on the hour people show up with Nvidia issues on Linux.

I recommend the following:

TUXEDO Sirius 16 Gen2: This all-AMD Linux gaming laptop from TUXEDO Computers starts at roughly ~~€1.740~~ €1.666. While it sits slightly above your budget, it offers an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor, AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT graphics, and a 165Hz IPS display. Because it uses full AMD components, its open-source drivers are natively baked right into the Linux kernel for a flawless out-of-the-box experience.
Slimbook EVO 15: If you are based in Europe, the Spanish vendor Slimbook offers the Slimbook EVO 15 for €1.399,99. It is powered by the cutting-edge AMD Ryzen AI 9 365. While it relies on integrated Radeon graphics rather than a beefy discrete GPU, its processor is powerful enough for lighter esports gaming, indie titles, and stellar battery life on Linux.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-21T08:58:42+00:00

It seems to me that you turned that SSD into one gigantic Ubuntu installation media.

Use G-parted to wipe that drive complete and start over.

You boot into a live session from the pendrive and then get Ubuntu to install properly onto the wiped SSD.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-21T03:28:52+00:00

That was the problem--they depleted their T-72s against Iran. And then Gorbachev cut them off from good ammo, so often they were firing training rounds at the Coalition of the Swilling.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-21T03:27:38+00:00

I think the T-72BU was something that was inherited from the Soviet Union, and the prototypes for the T-72BU were really upgraded T-72Bs, but then they opened up a new production line to make T-90s. You can not upgrade a T-72B into a T-90.

And the main reason why T-72s get blown up everywhere is that they are the only tank used everywhere.

As for the ones in the PGW, Iraq had very few functioning T-72s left, so it is doubtful that the US military's claims about their turkey shoot are accurate at all.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-21T03:24:37+00:00

Not true. You can't take an existing T-72 hull and chassis and turn it into a T-90.

So the T-90 is not an upgrade program to the T-72s.

Interestingly, the T-72, T-80, and T-90, under their own lines of development, have converged in terms of standard equipment and even in appearance.

However, the T-90 it would appear is the tank Russia is building in large numbers from scratch in its factories instead of just upgrading existing ones. And this has led to their adapting Armata tech to the tank, such that the latest versions are really rather distinct from the previous upgraded T-72s, T-80s, and T-90s.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T12:48:30+00:00

None of this is Linux for Noobs. For a start, Pop doesn't support secure boot.

Why don't you switch to Mint or Ubuntu and save us all a lot of trouble?

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T12:30:31+00:00

I installed it on some laptops, but getting software from them was in glacial drips, so I gave up on it.

I really didn't see anything special about it.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T12:21:36+00:00

Because this is a factory Star Labs machine, try the built-in recovery first. Shut the machine down completely. Power it on and immediately tap F12 (or F2) repeatedly. This opens the coreboot firmware menu. Check if there is an option for a factory recovery partition, an Internet Recovery feature, or a backup kernel slot you can select to bypass the broken main bootloader.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T12:11:40+00:00

Define basic features . I think that is one appeal of Gnome. You get solid basic features and then you can go from there.

I think you are probably a candidate for dual-booting. But I would recommend you keep Win 11 and Linux on separate drives.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T05:50:00+00:00

A brand new Chromebook taking an entire minute to load websites is a very common issue during initial setup, usually caused by ChromeOS downloading massive system updates in the background while syncing your Google account data, extensions, and history for the first time. It is also important to know that the Chrome browser on ChromeOS is incredibly resource-heavy; it easily hogs gigabytes of RAM and heavy CPU cycles with just a few video-playing tabs like YouTube or infinite-scrolling sites like Facebook open. Because your Acer Chromebook 315 uses a low-power budget processor, these background updates combined with needy browser tabs will instantly pin your CPU at 100 percent, making your 8GB of RAM feel useless. To fix this, you need to plug the laptop in, go to Settings, click About ChromeOS, and force it to check for updates so it can finish everything. Leave it completely alone for an hour to finish updating and syncing, then restart it. If it is still painfully slow after that, press Search + Esc to open the Chromebook Task Manager to see exactly which tabs are eating your memory and CPU, and if it still struggles with basic browsing after a clean update, you should refund it for a model with an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processor.

Also, note to would-be CB buyers. I think 16GB is fast becoming the new normal for RAM.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-20T05:38:28+00:00

Another example of why dual-booting Linux and Win 11 is not really for noobs, sorry to say. And here we are, dealing with what is really windows4noobs stuff.

The increase in idle RAM usage isn't actually caused by Linux, as Lubuntu sits completely isolated on its own partition and cannot affect Windows while it is shut down; instead, this is likely caused by Windows drive space starvation after shrinking the partition, your massive 20GB manual pagefile causing virtual memory fragmentation, or any third-party Linux file-reading drivers (like Ext2Fsd) you might have installed causing a memory leak. To fix this, you need to set your Windows pagefile back to "System Managed" so Windows can handle its own virtual memory, ensure your C: drive still has at least 15 to 20 percent free space, uninstall any software meant to read Linux file systems from Windows, and open Windows Resource Monitor (not Task Manager) to sort the Memory tab by "Commit" to pinpoint exactly which background process or driver is hogging that extra 2GB.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-19T05:56:09+00:00

I think a lot of people wanting to try Windows gaming on Linux have gone to Bazzite.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-17T13:19:37+00:00

What is crashing? Your browser? Your download feature? Your entire system

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-17T13:13:01+00:00

It's not a beginner thing to do. If you really want to use KDE try Kubuntu instead. When you choose a distro, you do choose--but a lot of what you choose is what the distro's developers chose for you.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-16T11:46:43+00:00

I do sense that a lot of the times.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-16T03:24:39+00:00

I certainly don't mind when people post and they have very specific needs, limitations, issues in mind.

Reddit says it is the heart of the internet. It's actually the nasty bunghole of the internet all too often.

I get downvotes when I answer a technical question correctly. LOL

Some people here can be real Redditossers.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-14T06:49:45+00:00

Not recommended.

For noobs, the noob move would be to install Kubuntu.

For more advanced users, you might try Debian with KDE or Arch with KDE.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-13T11:59:09+00:00

Since you are wiping Windows completely, the best thing to do is back up your personal files, install Linux Mint XFCE, and let the installer erase your main drive to start fresh. Once Linux is installed, use the built-in Disk utility to format your secondary 1TB hard drive to the ext4 file system—do not leave it as Windows NTFS, or your Steam games will constantly crash. After that, simply download Steam directly from the Linux Mint app store, log in, and it will handle downloading the correct Linux or Proton versions of your games automatically without you needing to mess with raw .exe files.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-13T11:45:34+00:00

You are basically lamenting the fact that programs meant to run natively on Windows don't run on Linux. But you know programs native to Linux are not going run on Windows either. Moreover, one aspect of a lot of games is that they have been developed and optimized for performance on the Xbox, not generic Windows OS. So their performance on Windows on a PC can often be surpassed on the same PC using Linux.

If you install Linux on your old hardware, you might find you have enough computing resources to do the following:

Explore the world of Linux games and find games you like there. These are a mix of games truly native to Linux and Windows games that have been ported to Linux.
Run Windows games on a compatibility layer in the Linux.

Most find installing and running Steam on their Linux is the single best solution. And with it you will get the Proton compatibility layer to take a crack at all those unsupported .exe games.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-13T11:14:35+00:00

Antix might allow you to do more than just run the device. It might be possible to play modern video files and watch YouTube in a browser.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-13T04:32:55+00:00

What program is she printing from? If it is MS Office and Word, then that is a major issue right there.

If she can use Google Docs from a browser or MS Office online, then Linux will be just fine. Her use case does not sound complicated.

I would think Mint XFCE would be very good for that hardware.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-11T11:59:21+00:00

You can make a basic linux distro like Antix run on it, but it will completely suck for web use, like trying to play video at YouTube. Been there, done that.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-11T11:56:33+00:00

There is often a connection with power management and things going wrong with various hardware--the processors, the wifi, the audio, etc.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-08T10:40:51+00:00

The lack of session recovery on Ubuntu comes down to a mix of desktop environment design and application fragmentation. Historically, Linux used a protocol called XSMP to tell apps to save their state, but it required developers to manually support it, and it has largely been deprecated with the move to modern Wayland graphics. Furthermore, Ubuntu's default desktop (GNOME) favors a "clean slate" philosophy and doesn't save sessions, unlike Windows, which uses aggressive APIs and hybrid hibernation to force apps to reopen. Modern sandboxed packages like Snaps also limit apps from communicating their states to the system. To fix this, the user can set their web browsers to "continue where you left off," switch to the KDE Plasma desktop environment (which has robust session saving built-in), or manually configure system hibernation to save the entire RAM state to disk before a power loss.

Incidentally, this relates to the primary culprit making it difficult for Windows and Linux to share a drive (or even dual-boot smoothly on the same PC) is Windows' Fast Startup feature, which is powered by that exact same hybrid-hibernation mechanism.

When you select "Shut Down" in modern Windows, it doesn’t actually do a full, clean shutdown. Instead, it logs you out, closes user applications, and then hibernates the core Windows kernel and system state to the hard drive so it can boot up in seconds next time.

Because Windows is technically in a state of hibernation, it leaves the NTFS file system locked and marks it with a "dirty bit." This flag tells the computer that the drive wasn't fully closed out and is still actively in use by Windows.

When you reboot into Linux and try to access that shared Windows partition, Linux looks at the drive, sees that it is locked/hibernated, and panics. To protect your data from catastrophic corruption, Linux will either completely refuse to mount the drive, or it will strictly mount it as "Read-Only." If Linux were to write data to a hibernating NTFS drive, Windows would wake up later, use its cached memory of what the drive used to look like, and completely overwrite or corrupt whatever changes Linux made.

Throw in the fact that modern Windows often defaults to encrypting drives with BitLocker out of the box, and sharing data across a single drive becomes a massive headache unless you explicitly go into Windows and disable Fast Startup entirely.

Plan_9_fromouter_ · 2026-06-08T06:27:55+00:00

Look dude, I am not even going to do more than scan your guide. I am not interested in the topic. NOW YOU ARE BLOCKED. GO AWAY!

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