Don’t make the mistake I did and go with mac. Apple has great products but they used planned obsolescence to make you waste money on new equipment on a regular basis. Windows just bites. So go with a Linux laptop for sure. Your money will stretch out further for sure. Thinkpads X1 Carbón are great. Older generations have great battery life. If you game there’s other thinkpad a that have graphics carda. Thinkpads work great with Linux usually. Specially carbon x1
Eh you can get new major version updates for about 6 years on Macs, and several more unofficially. It's nothing compared to the 20+ years you could get with Linux, but let's be honest, there's no point in keeping a laptop for that long.
If you don't need the latest and greatest MacOS, I can tell you that the 2012 non-retina Macbook Pro I gave to my mom after I was done with it is still kicking strong and still got security updates up till last year. Sometime this summer I'm gonna have to install the unofficial patch so I can get Monterey or Ventura running on it for 2-3 more years of security updates.
Now I still wouldn't recommend a Mac for a student though. Reason being, I wouldn't recommend a student get a brand new machine unless their parents are rich and I wouldn't recommend Intel Macs to anyone at this point. The ARM ones just blow them out of the water, with ridiculous performance and especially performance per watt metrics. In particular, compiling any big projects is a BREEZE with the ARM chips. But as a student that barely matters if you're mostly doing small to medium sized school projects, not compiling the Linux kernel. And afterwards it should be your employer providing you with the machine, so unless you do hobby projects of huge magnitude or work on large established open source projects, compile times on a personal machine won't matter too much.
This question is just going to draw a lot of “hey what’s your favourite distro” responses.
But if you want something EL-like that isn’t RHEL, consider the bastard child of Conectiva and Mandrake, long ejected from the RedHat family but still very similar – PCLinuxOS. It has the superior signed packaging format, and it has much of the same workflow. Its packer compatibility suffers greatly from its mageia times - I think - so they’re still a bit ghetto about anything at scale, but that’s almost the only thing they don’t have nailed-down. Their massive compatibility window delivers on everything AppStream claims but cannot.
For minimal stuff, consider AlpineLinux, which also is free of Systemd and still manages to run really well for reasons Lennart’s fans simply can’t understand.
On the one hand they do have a point, and as a Fedora volunteer it saddens me to see that it is affecting the wrong crowd, RH workers, who are receiving directly and indirectly the backlash, mostly snowballed by clickbait and plain disinformation.
On the other hand saying that redistributing the code you provide under the GPL “doesn’t provide any value” sounds just as dystopian as it seems.
At this ratez they are just digging themselves deeper at this PR nightmare.
I'm a long time Opensuse user but that is also somewhat RedHat based I think . Highly recommend it, though. Have been using it on a server since 2014 and just kept updating through all the opensuse versions since then without problems. Exceptionally stable.
Also use it on my work laptop and I'm also with that very satisfied regarding stability and usability.
I dont understand how redhat is going to police this policy of “we’ll keep source code open to paying customers, but reserve the right to cancel a customer that shares said source”.
Toss in GUID’s or randomly place identity files to anyone that downloads the RHEL source hoping they get accidentally published as an identifying attribute if someone does decide to publish it elsewhere.
They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it’s based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.
Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can’t even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can’t exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.
I don’t think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren’t small, so that’ll cost.
The companies I’ve helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.
It’s possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it’s many
I don’t know, I’ve worked in Debian/Ubuntu companies mostly. Last two had thousands of servers and both had an apt-mirror custom repo including the deb-src ones. Otherwise we just get ourselves banned from the official mirrors when thousands of VMs pull updates from the same NAT IP.
Not sure how that works exactly on the RHEL side, maybe it’s not nearly as easy or common to do that.
If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you’re in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.
evolution works ok, I just don’t like the look and feel. There’s a lot of customization possible … but it’s just not for me somehow. so far the thunderbird beta is quite nice.
Have to also add to the voices recommending Debian stable. I’ve used it now for ten straight years after I stopped distro-hopping for my servers and desktop, and I cannot imagine using another distro. It’s incredibly stable, but the best part of Debian is the absolutely expansive repositories that even the Arch User Repository can’t beat. Very rarely do I ever need to use Flatpak (ugh) for packages, or look to add in new external repositories.
@americanwaste@bzImage
Honestly Ive had the inverse experience where the package I need is only in AUR and not debian repos, but at least we can agree that Flatpak and Snap are terrible
That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn’t have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see repology.org)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven’t yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.
I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it’s easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).
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