Older Microsoft Surfaces have quite terrible battery life, especially on Linux, have terrible thermals and aren’t very repairable. I’m in the middle of repairing a Surface Pro 7 and the wifi antenna is sandwiched between the frame and the screen, so taking the screen off is a death wish for the wifi antenna (even ifixit ripped it in their repair). The battery is also permanently glued onto the frame, saying that it should not be removed or replaced. The Surface, with an Intel CPU, absolutely fries itself trying to update Windows as well. The heatsink inside seems to use the screen and battery as a thermal mass? I believe modern Surfaces are better in both repairability and battery life.

iPads have pretty decently efficient CPUs and have decent performance - probably doesn’t get as hot as a Surface…

Samsung tablets seem ok too and definitely undercut the two when new

I would recommend getting something older (e.g. Tab S7, S8, S9, S7 FE, S9 FE, or iPads or Surfaces second hand if you don’t have much money - they may come with a keyboard cover which will cost you an arm or a leg when new.

You may also consider flip laptops if you don’t demand too much from your laptop. Compared to iPads and Samsung Tablets, you can use Windows or Linux or whatever. Depending on what you study, that may be important. Flip laptops typically have not great thermal performance so don’t expect amazing normal laptop like performance, but I’ve previously had an Acer Spin 5 and now I’m using a Dell Latitude 7440 2-in-1 and they’ve both been great for light workloads. They’re bulky compared to tablets and I’d only use them on tables, which isn’t a problem for me. I lose out on the higher wattage CPUs used in non 2-in-1 laptops though. Some people describe 2-in-1s as a jack of all trades, master of none, as they’re not great laptops and not great tablets. I’ve personally really enjoyed having everything on one device - online exams could be done in Xournal++, exported to PDF and just uploaded all on one device.

I think they are wondering if one extension can use both v2 and v3 APIs at once? As in whether v3 APIs will be “backported” to allow v2 extensions to use them

I don’t think I have enough knowledge to solve this or say anything for certain, but I wonder if the power button is treated as an external keyboard and is getting ignored in tablet mode?

I’m using an app to use my Android phone as a webcam, which works great (good low light performance!) provided I can stand it up somewhere above my laptop screen (finicky). You can accidentally knock it over. Might be worth considering if you don’t use the camera much - otherwise an external one will probably attach better and he more stable

Regarding your mouse double clicking, some Reddit users suggest pressing the click button quite hard a few times…

Not recommending against RustDesk - it is a very cool project - but regarding the “Why?”, you could use a VPN or something like Tailscale which has MagicDNS that’ll resolve hostnames of computers to their local IP address. You can use this with GNOME’s RDP server to remote in from another device pretty easily.

PairDrop(dot)net is a fork with a bit more features

I believe they’re available as backup but re-calibrate themselves with GPS coordinates if available. This is not a problem when GPS jamming is used but becomes an issue with spoofing - the pilots need to monitor for it.

I think they talk about it in this video by flightradar24 somewhere: https://youtu.be/4dG_Whxzdkk

Strange. The default keyboard works wonders for me but doesn’t automatically pop up. Are you able to swipe from the bottom edge of the display to make it pop up?

Right? Even MacBook Pros have larger batteries in the 14 inch and 16 inch lineup.

Just use Waydroid instead: https://waydro.id, much lower overhead, however you need to mess with ARM emulation. For installing Google Apps and Device not Play certified: https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script

More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid

Dell laptops have mostly just worked on Linux quite well, but you may run into issues with the camera, however this hack(?) has worked for me: https://github.com/stefanpartheym/archlinux-ipu6-webcam.

I believe Dell has a catch for the camera saying that it may use more CPU when in use. Whilst the laptop is Ubuntu Certified, the camera only works if you select the Ubuntu option instead of Windows, and use the install they give you.

Some other nice things to have:

• fwupd should also work for firmware updates, hopefully. My speakers sounded worse on Linux than Windows, some tinkering with hdataskretask helped a little, however it’s still worse.
• This should let you change some bios settings, like changing charge limits and thermal profile (cool, performance, balanced etc): https://github.com/dell/libsmbios
• This GNOME shell extension allows you to change charge limits easily: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5724/battery-health-charging/

re: OneNote

Although not a replacement for OneNote on Windows 10/OneNote in Microsoft 365, you can get Waydroid and run OneNote’s Android app with it.

I don’t have a stylus so I’m not able to check if everything works, but if it does, it’ll hopefully feel better than the web client, which wasn’t able to keep up with stylus strokes last time I checked. The number of pens is lacking though, even the iPadOS version is better…

We have a Panasonic inverting one that has a flat bed (no turn table) and it doesn’t heat evenly…