For something like a USB-C to C or USB-C to A, If you have something like an external M.2 SSD with a USB C connector and a fast enough port on your PC, you could see how fast a large file transfers. For USB C to C, most things I think should be USB 3.0 or higher, and you can tell whether some USB As are USB 2.X or USB 3.X by looking down the end and seeing whether it has that smaller fifth pin in the back. The color of the plastic tab in the USB can sometimes be an indicator, albeit an unreliable one as manufacturers are always screwing around with the colors. Blue usually means USB 3.X, black sometimes means USB 2.X, and white sometimes means USB 1.X. Any other color like orange is more likely to mean USB 3 than not, but not necessarily.
For USB A to Micro USB, I am fairly certain those will be USB 2.X. I am not aware of any micro USB device which operated at USB 3.X speeds. The only thing to watch out for are cheap cables with only power and ground populated and no data lines. But the easy way to test that is to just see whether a device is detected and identified at all by your PC through the cable, as that means the data lines are populated.
HDMI, I'm less sure, but if you have a high resolution/refresh rate monitor, you could try connecting it between the PC and the monitor and see what resolution/refresh rate options are listed, or seeing if there are visual artifacts or noise at the highest settings.
Ah, okay. Then yes, as others have mentioned, it sounds like you want a portable linux install.
I keep around install USBs of both Arch Linux and Mint, as both boot into a live version of the distro, and I can either open a terminal to debug things, or arch-chroot into my arch install if I broke my bootloader or something.
Makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact that you described it as "a refurb" and assumed you had bought something refurbished.
Side question: you bought a laptop but don't know what specs it has? How did that happen?
I'm not sure that I follow the rationale. If this is your only active machine, what is the issue with having to shut down and boot into an installer to install Linux?
Is your goal to overwrite your existing OS with Linux, or to dual boot?
That's good to know. Thanks!
Yeah, that's fair. It definitely depends on the model and the product tier. All the manufacturers, even Lenovo's lower end/consumer models, can have poor build quality on some models, so I would avoid those. Your average mid-tier and up business laptop will probably hold up just fine, though.
At some level it may also be luck of the draw, even if build quality will help the odds. Sometimes even a high-end laptop can get dropped once at the wrong angle and stop working, and yet I have seen beat-up chromebooks which looked like they came from a warzone and yet somehow still run.
Sure, there is certainly nothing wrong with a T480, and if you can find them at a reasonable price then go for it. That said, I would not exclude any other brands out of hand if you can find a good deal on, say, a 3-5 year old business laptop from the likes of Dell or HP. For all the durability of a T480, bear in mind that it will already be ~8 years old when you get it.
I think historically Linux users had to be a bit more particular about laptop models due to spotty driver support on laptop hardware, hence the love for Thinkpads which had good Linux compatibility, but these days I think the only real compatibility concerns are around fingerprint sensors with proprietary drivers and the occasional oddball wifi chip.
Upgrading BIOS is also a concern as @PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world mentioned, but in some cases I have used a bootable Windows USB drive to run the .exe-based FW upgrades on my HP laptop, for example.
I don't think you need to limit yourself to a Thinkpad specifically. Linux should work on almost any laptop these days. I would look around for secondhand business laptops. They tend to be reasonably priced and often gently used when they are coming from business environments.
I didn't know that. I will have to try that out. Thanks.
[Palpatine voice]: "Do it!"
I decided to be a bit silly and have it in my rabbit yunomi. This sample I had was quite good. It has a bit of that brothy, rich note that one associates with gyokuro. Shinchas tend to be a bit stronger than normal sencha, and so can often have a bitter edge which I do not prefer. This one was very mellow, though, with very little bitterness.
I apologize for the sub-optimal lighting in a slightly dark corner of my living room.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what this might be? The location is North Carolina, USA. I'm no expert, but looking around at some photos, my best guess might be a grass spider of the genus Agelenopsis. Hopefully this isn't too mundane of a spider for this community.
The size I would estimate is around 15mm or so. Fortunately, they were a very cooperative photography subject and did not move while I went and grabbed a ruler for the last image below.
I feel like, as you already mentioned, a headless arch install sounds the closest to what you want.
I'm not sure why you need to write your own install script. What's wrong with the normal Arch install script? I've never used it myself, actually.
When I first installed arch, I wrote down each step in the tutorial video I watched into a set of discrete steps. I now have that .odt saved and can pull it up again whenever needed, so reinstalling arch isn't as daunting as it was for me originally, but I still have the flexibility of doing everything manually and understanding why I am doing each step.