“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
I think you’re mixing up Office 365 and Office Online.
Office 365 is a subscription for Microsoft Office that includes access to both the full, more powerful desktop Office applications and the much less powerful Office Online.
Though I don’t think it’s even called Office 365 anymore, but I don’t respect MS enough to bother to Google what they’re calling it now.
What model Thinkpad was it? Just curious.
Part of me wants to plug Thinkpad E16 as the cheapest new laptop you can get away with, but if the trackpad is the same one that drives you insane. Honestly, I don’t really care about the trackpad because I exclusively use Trackpoint.
Also, I would call the speakers mediocre, but honestly, I rarely listen to audio on my laptop, so they may be total crap.
FYI, 14” is sort of the new 13.3”. A lot of newer 14” laptops are the about size of an older 13.3” laptop, but just have less bezel.
Same situation as with 16” vs 15.6”.
AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.
NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.
Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!
Good! I just remembered that from the days I used to use Debian on a Microsoft Surface.
Which DE are you using? At least for XFCE, there’s HDPI and XHDPI themes you can choose in the Window Manager settings.
Do note that the yt-dlp version in stable will go out of date; I recommend installing it from the backports repo so it keeps updating.
I also use XFCE. My desktop’s currently on Forky and went through all of Trixie, and the emdia keys have worked fine.
I’ll have to fiddle around and see what’s going on, though it may take a few days to get back because I’m starting school again soon, so I’m quite busy.
For reference, what programs do you tend to use with media keys? For instance, VLC, Firefox, etcetera.
What desktop environment are you using?
And maybe just give device model for good measure.
Neat. I love Debian, but its documentation is crap! I hope this works out and I can see an improvement.
Before you give up on XFCE and/or Chicago95 - have you replaced the default menu with Whisker Menu? For me, Whisker Menu is a must-have for any sane XFCE user. When I used it with Chicago95, I found I could have a Windows 7 style interface with Windows 95 aesthetics.
Honestly, even if Chicago95 is aesthetically not what you want, I’d recommend trying an alternate theme on XFCE - I currently use modified DesktopPal '97 combined with a pack of Haiku-style icons.
Overall, I’d be interested to know more about your qualms with XFCE and see if customization can help you overcome them. A lot of distros have annoying defaults for XFCE, but I changed a few simple settings and have a desktop I rather enjoy using. It is totally fine if it still isn’t the thing for you after any potential discussion, but I just want to make sure you really know what XFCE has to offer before you move on.
I remember my 1st Surface Go’s microSD card reader being pretty good.