Also, for context, part of my exFAT leanings are that while NTFS is read-only on Mac, exFAT is read-write. I’d presume as I am, you’re not a frequent Mac user, but I’ve had situations in the past where I had to use one.
My pleasure. The LG problem is unfortunate. Most other devices tend to support exFAT, but LG is an exception, albeit a very big one due to its pervasiveness as a brand. I do have an LG TV, but an older one that’s getting annoying to the point it’s tempting to throw a Roku behind it. Also, do you have a laptop with HDMI? That could also be a solution.
I get the feeling I’ll become a bcachefs fan for those reasons in the future (I tested it on a spare laptop as soon as 6.7 got into Debian Testing), but for now, I use a mix of ext4 and btrfs, as bcachefs-tools isn’t in Testing. It is trivial to apt-pin, but I try not to make FrankenDebian a regular thing. I have a feeling that they’ll iron it out and Bcachefs will be an option in Trixie by the tome it hits stable, if still with a /boot partition considering the slow state of Grub support.
I mostly agree with the assessment, although it seems like though it’s not designed to be replaced, the keyboard is in fact replaceable with some extra misery. The durability seems to have improved, though; it’s mostly aluminum on the exterior.
Qemu/KVM and Virt Manager. I have three VMs that I pass my GPU to: a Hackintosh, a Windows 10, and and Windows 7.
NTFS support is pretty solid on Linux these days, but just so you know, never use it as a root partition.
I have generally used ext4. There's ways to massage it to mount on Windows, as with btrfs. Ext4 is very likely what you should do if you're installing Linux for the first time, as it has had decades of testing and is rather battle-tested
I recently did my first btrfs install. For now, I've had no issues. Of course, some could happen, but I've generally heard btrfs is fine these days. One of its cool things is native compression support, although I forgot to enable it when I did that install.
I've never used XFS.
FAT32 should be rarely used these days due to file size limits and file name limits. The only place where it should still be used is for your EFI partition.
Now exFAT really isn't that unrecognizable. It's supported by pretty much every operating system these days. It's definitely not for root partitions, but should be your default for flash drives and portable hard drives.
On another note, I recently tried Bcachefs on Debian Testing on a random old Chromebook. It is still in development, and not all distros support it yet, but I liked what I saw from my limited experience. It also supports snapshots, and unlike btrfs, has native encryption. For now, just ignore it, but like many in this post have said, keep an eye out for it.
As for ZFS, I've never tried it. The main caveat is due to licensing incompatibility, it is not in the standard Linux kernel and you have to do some special stuff.
Honestly, I haven't used PopOS frequently, but I tested it in a VM once and think it very well might be the best distro in terms of ease of use and ecosystem.
Cool. The fingerprint scanner is a feature I don't really care about, though so I'm fine with it not working. I think Lenovo provides drivers according to a comment on LinuxHardware, but I'm wary of proprietary drivers.
Software-wise, part of it is my fault for imposing Debian Stable on myself, rather than choosing a newer distro. Hardware-wise, though, I do imagine that X220 is quite a bit easier to bust open.
In all fairness, though, besides a LUK2/Btrfs configuration that would have been annoying to do on any platform anyhow, this was probably the easiest Linux install I have ever done*. My previous main portable device was a first-gen Surface Go that (with the special linux-surface kernel) worked okay except for glitches surrounding sleep and wake that lead to lots of reboots. One day,, the initramfs got borked and I didn't use it frequently enough (as I had a work Chromebook I was forced to use and at home I could just use my desktop) to bother to chroot in and fix it. Server someday?
Eventually, I received my work Chromebook, an AMD Stoney Ridge, when I left and it was decommissioned, which I installed Linux on and then proceeded to compile a custom kernel just to get audio working. (I eventually tried to automate this in Gitlab CI for fun, but found more important things to do.)
I then tried an old Lenovo Yoga 710 15-IKB from circa 2016 I had sitting around, but it had a damaged digitizer that was getting to be a laceration hazard; it was literally cheaper to buy an entire working one on eBay than replace the wrong part. It also had a hardware defect where the camera would quit working until you gave the bezel a little pinch in the right spot. Thus, it mostly just sits around as a backup machine in case my Thinkpad were to suddenly explode, and maybe I'll put it to server duty in the near future.
Even my desktop was just a bit more effort to install, as it has been running Debian Testing since 2022 (my first daily driver Linux system) when Bookworm was still testing and before Debian started including non-free firmware in the installer by default, meaning I had to install several things to get it fully working. Tied with my desktop was a circa-2010 Fujitsu Lifebook that I threw Buster on that also needed Wi-Fi firmware.
I'll take one yeating of newer distribution kernel in comparison. 😂
- Not including VMs or Raspberry Pis 😉
I have a cool background of just the station that I edited in GIMP to dither so it looks nice with Chicago95 (along with a similar Enterprise D for my second monitor), but I only use that on my desktop, as although I love Chicago95, unlike my desktop, this laptop needs to be low-frills manchine, so I can't afford theme-related glitches as much as I love theming. (Not "no-frills", however, as I did go through the extra trouble of a btrfs subvolume for home on a LUKS2 partition that auto-decrypts with Clevis)
This mirrored my though process when composing the screenshot! I almost covered up O'Brien's face with the terminal window, but then realized the guy had gone through enough suffering.
I’ll be frank - I never have, though I probably should. For me, if an application’s configuration ever annoys me enough, I just manually copy the config from a machine that I already did the config.
One day, I may set up a shell script based on Debian’s Debootstrap that feeds it a list of packages (I think you can provide it a text file with a list of packages) to get everything set up, but that day is not today.