Microsoft increased prices for all of its Surface PCs this week, with most models priced hundreds of dollars higher than they were when launching. Windows Central highlighted the increases, which now see Microsoft's mid-range models priced above $1,000 and flagship models priced starting at $1,500. A Microsoft spokesperson said the price increase was due to "recent increases in memory and component costs".
Yeah, Fedora is into the open source only install thing. So Codecs don’t get installed by default and need to added later. Don’t feel bad about it. That catches a lot of first time users. They do make it pretty easy to get them installed once you know you need to do that.
The speaker thing was unfortunate. I’m notorious for buying the cheapest hardware I can find. And I think I only had that popping issue once years ago when distros were far more rough around the edges then they are today. My problem with Fedora is that it loses my printer randomly. But I don’t print a lot, so I haven’t bothered with looking for a fix.
You’ve still got a lot of surfing to do yet, and you’ve tried Fedora. CatchyOS is supposed to be pretty beginner-friendly for an Arch fork. But I’m not sure CatchyOS has a really high user retention rate. I should look into it one day, but I’m old, and my surfing days are over. I like atomic spins because once setup they require no effort on my part anymore. They are boring and I like it that way.
The speaker popping thing was so weird! It happened with anything plugged into the built-in 3.5mm jack, and it happened A LOT. It’s normal to hear that while first booting or shutting down, but Fedora did it like a LOT. The machine is a Lenovo Tiny, so it’s nice hardware. I have replicated the pops in Catchy now on another (identical) Lenovo Tiny, but only when it dims the screen for power-save mode. Solution: no more power save mode hahaha.
I didn’t even consider printer! I have a laserjet on my network, I’ll have to set that up on each of my distros and see how they handle it!
I have noticed that Lenovo laptops can have some weird issues with Fedora. From your speaker issues to not being able to get the distro installed for no good reason. The problems are not all that common, but they do happen.
I think Laser printers work very well with Fedora. My HP 7100 color inkjet is a royal pain sometimes. But Grandma demands to be able to print color photos of our Grandsons at any time. She ain’t waiting until we have a good reason to make the 100-mile round trip to the nearest store that can print out digital photos for her. And I ain’t spending the money for a photo quality laser printer.
My lil Lenovos are actually desktops! But I’m sure they use laptop parts, considering their insanely small size. Getting Linux on any of them was a breeze, I knew to install windows first and disable all the stupid fast boot/secure boot garbage, and I did get some errors starting out that some things in my BIOS were not enabled (VMX and SGX) but I was able to easily find and enable those! :3
Turning off fast boot is still a good idea, but Linux distros do work with secure boot these days. So there is no need to turn it off anymore. Not saying it can’t cause some issues at times, though rarely anymore. But Microsoft does provide the keys for secure boot. Where you can find an issue is with proprietary drivers like Nvidia. But Fedora has good and clear instructions on creating and installing MOK, (machine owner keys) to solve the secure boot issue them. I know the Arch wiki has them also.
In any case enjoy CachyOS and whatever comes after!
I didn’t know that—thank you for the info! I’m only really trying various distros to learn more, so I appreciate any and all advice anyone gives me!
I don’t know anything about MOKs, so I’ll do some reading this morning! So far Fedora is prolly gonna stay on the living room media computer, as it works a dream, is super fast, and now that I’ve solved the few issues it had, it’s excellent! My partner who has only used a bit of Linux has no complaints about it haha.
I’ll eventually have to settle on a distro for our main game machines. They’ll still be dual booting W10LTSCIoT for games that don’t work in Linux, but if I can switch every computer in the house to main Linux, I’ll be a happy Rai! Right now, there’s just a couple big things that either only work on Windows, or are so much easier to manage on Windows (hosting a Valheim server with multiple different worlds and modlists that can be easily switched between is a big one right now for me) I gotta boot windows for those.
I have been lucky not to have had issues with NVidia, but on our third game machine, I went with Pop as it was recommended for easy install with NVidia for games hahaha. I made that machine specially for Beat Saber (no Facebook code on any machines with PII in my house!) so if can get Beat Saber with like a thousand songs modded in playing on my ASUS WMR kit on Linux, I’d be over the moon. Alas, it looks like Oasis only works for Winders right now, but it sounds like some smarter folks than I have been working on a WMR driver for Linux.
Older NVIDIA cards tend to be pretty stable, but the latest and greatest stuff not so much.
Since you have a fair number of boxes to manage. If it was me, I would take a look at Atomic distros. And Fedora is a big driver of them. Since you like KDE, you could test the Kinonite spin. And if you do want the hassle of installing nVidia drivers, then maybe Aurora, (a direct fork of Kinonite), might be a better choice. You can choose your graphics card when you download the iso, install and then have everything working on first boot. Aurora also has all the codecs included. Atomic spins make managing multiple computers for users so much easier. Your partner can install/uninstall user software with little worry about breaking the system. And you sleep better at night.
Not saying you need to do it, go have some fun with CachyOS and other distros. But maybe start learning about it and thinking if it might have a place for you.