Okay that’s not just me, thank god. I thought something was just wrong with the sound deadening on my Forester, especially because my 30 year old Mazda 323 is at least 50% quieter. Nope, its what makes a Subaru, a Subaru.

Am I safe in guessing Queensland?

anything decent with an RJ-45 port

Not sure if the current generation still has it, but work issued us techs with ThinkPad L14 Gen 3 laptops and I’ve been happy with it as a work device. It has an RJ-45 (was considered a requirement when they procured the laptops for techs) and mine has a Ryzen 5 Pro 5675U. Only complaints I would have for it is soldered USB-C connectors (which double as the only power source for the machine) and keyboard isn’t as nice as my personal T480 although definitely still fine.

I would caution against the 12th gen Intel i7 ThinkPads, we’ve had multiple internally have overheating issues or stuck in connected standby. My colleague wishes he never replaced his original work issue (same as mine).

Yeah the E6430, as far as I understand it, was mainly a chipset upgrade to support Ivy Bridge processors, with some additional niceties like USB 3.0 and minor cosmetic differences.

I also had that sting from it too! Usually when it was on charge, I just always thought it was some kind of static electricity or otherwise some poor grounding.

I bought a T480 coming on a year ago as my first ThinkPad. I’m pretty happy with it, feels rugged and I’ve now fully conditioned myself to using the TrackPoint. Happy with the weight of it for the screen size, I have the 1080p one and it’s not bad at all.

My work device is a L14 Gen 3 with the Ryzen 5 something and it’s okay. I don’t like the flatter TrackPoint buttons but they’re still more than usable. I actually dropped it from about waist height from my car, and apart from some scuffs on the corners it’s still completely functional.

I do miss the media keys and CPU upgradability of my old Latitude E6420 (had that bad boy up to an i7-2760QM, 16GB DDR3, 512GB SSD) but it was just so bulky in comparison and the screen maxed out at only 1600x900 (which yes, I upgraded on it too).

One more thing for me to go on a tangent about, ThinkPad X240 was a poor choice as a secondary. I thought I wouldn’t care about the weird touchpad but it’s barely usable for me, either as a touchpad or TrackPoint. I’m selling that shit on to get either an X220 or X250 onwards, depending on what comes up.

“disable AI” checkbox

They’re not that nice, if they did it, it would just be “Reduce AI experiences”

I meant it in the sense of using an obscure operating system to be less likely to be targeted by a threat actor.

Or to be more general, using obscure software for increased security, over actually correctly configuring and using secure software.

Viruses already exist for Linux and have for a long time. They are less prevalent than Windows but this obviously shouldn’t be the primary defense strategy for your device.

…security by obscurity? Guess when Linux finally explodes in popularity, you’ll see me over on FreeBSD instead

I’m gonna beat the same drum most people beat here, you know it’s dystopian when you need the manufacturer’s permission to be “let” delete something from your device. This criticism equally applies to Android devices with locked bootloaders.

Aaaahh! Who are you?! Where’s Uncle Slim?

Re the web browsers I think you’re right. You may get away with a more lightweight browser like SeaMonkey or Falkon, maybe like 1 tab of Chromium lol

Distros I’d try on that would be Linux Mint Debian Edition, Debian w/ lightweight DE like LXDE or Xfce, or Arch Linux 32 if you really want to make it minimalist. Gentoo if you’re very adventurous but with my EEE PC I found compile times took up to days.

Seconding LMDE, been on it for a year on my study laptop. Literally never ever had a problem so far, and being an “out of box” distro there’s minimal work needed to daily drive.

Working at a computer shop, Lenovo ThinkPads are usually pretty fine, but the main fault we’ve seen with them is lack or completely missing thermal compound. On one occasion I saw my colleague’s machine not post, and IIRC we had to reset the CMOS to get it back up.

Sky News being least biased with high factual and credibility??? And the mods are surprised when we users keep protesting and downvoting this damn bot.

Enshittification truly is a shame, because my old school GPS actually does this already (Turn left past the McDonald’s) and while I have no idea whether it’s paid promotion or not on my device, I like that feature. If that feature is equally applied to any known business as a landmark (heck, even other services like police stations, fire stations, etc.) it would be appreciated by users.

Instead, and here we are beating this drum again, capitalism gets its grubby fingers in this pie too and uses it for further advertising, turning a good feature into a bad one.

I had to do a double take between this comment and the one by @davidgro@lemmy.world

Don’t be so certain - I’d recommend Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT over Windows 11 any day

I don’t think it is right? The environment looks completely different and the one in the post is 12", which the 11"8 (or now 12"4) never was.

God the school’s response is so sleazy and unapologetic

On the occasion I’ve rushed into an Aldi 30 minutes before closing, they have that too