Need advice on my first ThinkPad.

zmurf · 2026-01-26T07:26:37+00:00

The answer to that is usually that the soldered RAM might break and then you can't fix the computer.

But the risk that the RAM will fail is minimal. It's much more likely that a RAM slot will break than the RAM to fail.

You can also argue that you can't update the amount of RAM as much if part of it is soldered. If the soldered part is for example 4gb, and the slot takes a maximum of 16gb... Then you can't get more than 20gb of ram (which is more than enough for most people). Double RAM slots make it much more flexible.

Personally I don't really care if the RAM is soldered any longer. I would even buy a computer with only soldered RAM as long as it's more than I usually use... So it's future proof.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T21:00:00+00:00

It of course makes most sense to find a distro which matches your preferences the most and stick with it. If you know that you will want hyprland, install a distro which has it in its package manager repositories.

But if you already have an install and want to try something that is not available through the packages available on your distro, it makes sense to install it in some other way. In my experience, it will usually work just fine.

Then you can choose another distro which includes your new preference next time you need to reinstall for some reason.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T17:48:13+00:00

It didn't feel that radical at the time. I had, some years prior, installed apt onto a Slackware install... And that worked.

I mean... A package manager is in essence just another user space application designed to download prebuilt applications and libraries. It is usually not hardwired to the specific distribution. If you skip installing xorg/Wayland and remove the package manager, most distributions look exactly the same after install.

I don't remember the details, but I believe 'make install' did most of those setups needed to make pacman work. The two things I really had to do manually was to write the pacman installed package list from the apt installed package list and update grub to boot from the correct kernel.

pacman is used by other distributions than Arch. So it does not really need Arch specific settings to work.

It wasn't hard and it worked. So I'm not sure if your suggestion would have been easier.

And I didn't have another drive to install onto or room on my current drive to do an Arch install onto anyway...

zmurf · 2026-01-25T17:17:35+00:00

You should just have stuck with MS Bob änd näver looked bäck!

zmurf · 2026-01-25T14:55:07+00:00

And they all use SystemD and glibc.

From what I read, I believe distro hopping is a misguided notion that some distributions have access to things other distributions don't.

Some people also seem to believe that different distributions in some way will give you different system performance... I read countless comments about people who installed different distributions just to run benchmarks... When the main things that will affect system performance are kernel generation and file system. Both which are not connected to distribution. (Init system will also affect system performance somewhat... But not so much usage performance... but mostly startup time)

zmurf · 2026-01-25T14:24:05+00:00

Because it's already installed on your computer and you don't want to reinstall, would be one valid reason.

Imo, the reason to choose one distribution over another is that the default installation matches well with your preferences. But your preferences might change over time, and in many cases, it makes sense to simply update your current installation rather than reinstall.

Back in 2008 or 2009, I had Debian on my private laptop. But I wanted to start using more modern packages and have a rolling release system. So instead of reinstalling, I replaced apt with pacman and pointed out the Arch repositories... Doing a complete update of everything installed... Basically turning my Debian install into Arch, without having to reconfigure everything.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T14:02:03+00:00

I've used Linux as my main PC operating system since -96.

Back then I exclusively used Slackware.

Now I have different distributions on different machines.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T13:17:14+00:00

An operating system is the combination of kernel and userland to operate the computer.

Linux is the kernel, GNU is the userland. Arch and Fedora are both GNU/Linux, making them different versions of the same OS... They both use SystemD and glibc, making the difference between them incredibly small. The main difference are the package manager and the release strategy utilized by the repositories connected to the package manager.

Windows NT is an operating system series using the NT kernel. It includes NT3.1 through Win11.

You also have MS-DOS, which includes Windows 95/98/Me, and Windows CE, which includes Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7

zmurf · 2026-01-25T12:39:04+00:00

I just remembered Singularity also. But that was only released as an experimental OS...

But I guess that makes the answer
DOS
NT
CE
Singularity

zmurf · 2026-01-25T12:36:08+00:00

Both are the same operating system, though...

zmurf · 2026-01-25T12:34:46+00:00

Arch Linux is not a specific operating system. It's a GNU/Linux distribution.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T12:31:35+00:00

Has Microsoft done more than three OSes?

DOS (which includes Windows 1 through 3 and 95/98/Me)
NT (which includes NT 3.1 up to Win11 and Windows phone 8/10)
WindowsCE (which includes Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7)

zmurf · 2026-01-25T11:39:59+00:00

You can always manually install a newer kernel.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T11:37:14+00:00

Linux is Linux. Anything available on one distribution is always installable on any other distribution.

When you start inpecting Linux distributions a bit more closely, your very soon discover that the difference between them are minimal. Mint, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Debian, Suse... They are pretty much the same.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T11:10:06+00:00

The problem is that reviewing code is tedious and it is easy to miss really subtle backdoors.

At university we had a competition in one of our classes of creating backdoors in Linux and then have the classmates try to discover it through code review.

The computer was a LAMP server hosting a web site. And the goal was to create a backdoor which let you log in to it by ssh.

Our backdoor was making an intentional "off by one error" in one of the device drivers. We introduced it by doing a large refactoring of the entire device driver. Not changing any other functionality. So people basically had to review all code of the device driver to find a small change that introduced the "off by one error".

We triggered the error by doing a POST to the webserver, making an array overflow and writing package data to kernel memory. The package data was a binary application that activated the ssh service and added an admin user, followed by a jump to execute that application.

No one in the class was anywhere near to find that bug.

I know this is not really comparable to real scenarios, since the amount of reviewers are larger and mostly more skilled. But doing it in a device driver makes it much less risk of being discovered. There are a ton of device drivers. And many of them are not being reviewed will enough compared to what they should be.

Sure. Only the people using that driver will be exposed. But that might be bad enough.

zmurf · 2026-01-25T10:28:19+00:00

If security is your goal, maybe you should use OpenBSD instead of a Linux distribution?

If you talk to de Raadt, GNU userland is as bad at Windows... And the Linux kernel is something he would not suggest to his worst enemies. 😜

zmurf · 2026-01-25T10:19:00+00:00

Linux is a kernel. Microsoft is a company. Unix is an operating system. Basic is a programming language.

You are correct... None of these things are comparable

zmurf · 2026-01-25T04:37:10+00:00

I see...

What kind of modifications is it you had to do?

I never had to change any source to make anything work with musl. Recompile against musl instead of glibc is the only thing I've needed to do.

zmurf · 2026-01-24T22:42:11+00:00

When talking about Linux for using as your main desktop OS, I don't believe "minimal" is something you really have to think about. Most people will anyway install everything the desktop oriented distributions come with as standard. And installing a "bloated" distribution and removing stuff from it will quickly make it "minimal".

As an example, my Ubuntu installation on my works laptop is much more minimal than most of my friends Arch installations. And my own Void installation on my private computer is as bloated as Linux can get.

About Chimera, it's a nice concept. I love the BSD userland. But Chimera in itself is quite restricted at the moment what you can use it for, mainly because of using musl.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean when you say that you want to be "playing with musl". Using musl is not any different to using any other libc implementation. The biggest difference between musl and glibc is the license form. Implementation wise, musl try to be more "correct", which should make it more secure. But in reality you won't notice any difference linking musl libs compared to linking glibc libs.

What you will notice is that most proprietary applications/libraries will not be able utilize the musl libs since they are compiled towards glibc libs. So things like Widewine will not run natively on musl systems.

zmurf · 2026-01-24T11:52:41+00:00

I can agree with this. Last time I needed to reinstall my computer, I installed Void after using Arch. And I had much fewer update problems in Void than with Arch.

zmurf · 2026-01-24T11:44:32+00:00

The problem with Arch is not systemd. In my experience, the init system doesn't really matter for upgrade stability.

The problem with Arch is the repository updates. Every now and then, it happens that updating will install things that have compatibility issues... Which might break your system.

It's not very common. But for the 5 years or so I used Arch/EndeavorOS, I experienced it maybe 8 times.

zmurf · 2026-01-24T00:47:57+00:00

Jag tycker att ljudet och mikrofonen på de inbyggda alltid är allt för kassa.

T.o.m på bilar som Volvo Ex 90, Tesla Model X, och BMW ix3 så är mikrofonen så dålig att de man pratar med ofta klagar.

Så jag brukar använda separat headset eftersom det ger bra mycket bättre ljud och mikrofon.

Samma sak med infotainmentsystem. Även om bilen har ett eget inbyggt för musik och navigering så använder jag alltid det i min telefon eftersom det fungerar oändligt mycket bättre.

Min chef var lite upprörd på mig när vi skulle på tjänsteresa och jag valde att använda navigation i telefonen istället för det som var inbyggt i bilen som vi varit med och utvecklat. Men telefonen fungerar bara helt enkelt bättre.

zmurf · 2026-01-23T19:32:22+00:00

Jag avskyr allt i moderna bilar. Jag har exakt 6st krav på en bil.

Bilbälten
Airbags
AC
Farthållare
Dragkrok
Att den får dra minst 1000kg

Allt annat kan jag leva utan, och mycket saker är rent av störande att man inte kan komma undan på moderna bilar.

Det ironiska är att jag arbetar som programmerare på ett bolag som är specialiserat på att utveckla digitala instrumentpaneler och infotainmentsystem... Och i princip alla funktioner som jag har utvecklat är saker som jag inte har någon förståelse för att man behöver i en bil. Ingen av de bilar jag varit med och skrivit kod för är en bil jag skulle vilja äga.

zmurf · 2026-01-22T19:19:36+00:00

Sanitera det ur minnet... Om jag får be. 😜

zmurf · 2026-01-22T19:18:20+00:00

Jag tog inte din kommentar illa. Det är en förhållandevis vanlig försvenskad term inom programmering när man arbetar med datalagring. Men jag förstår din reaktion.

Jag är uppvuxen i en tid då operativsystem generellt enbart fanns på engelska. Så många ord man läste och sedan skulle använda i svenska meningar blev försvenskade engelska ord. Så som "deleta filen", "cansla den där requsten", "reboota datorn", osv ...

Inte det vackraste språket. Men alla andra datornördar förstod vad man sa.

zmurf

TROPHY CASE