T480 can be had on eBay for 200-300 bucks and will perform very well in modern applications. I’ve seen a few that are banged up pretty bad for under $200, if you’re cool with a well loved laptop.

I’m interested to try their Cosmic desktop later this year.

Overall, seems like a solid company, I’ve heard good things about their laptops, although I’ve never had one myself.

Pop_OS as a distro, heard generally good things about. The few times I’ve messed around with it have been fine. The folks that stick with it seem to like it.

Not really, accept that he definitely needs professional therapy from a licensed personal who is experienced dealing with that specific form of PTSD.

Remember, you aren’t his therapists, nor can you ever be, and trying to fill that role won’t be good for either person.

I had to learn this the hard way with a friend of mine who grew up with a very rough childhood. Lots of deep trauma, some pretty horrible stuff. I was trying to act like their therapist without intending it, and they started unintentionally treating me like a therapist.

It caused a lot of problems in our friendship and almost ended it actually. I had to eventually tell them, “I care about you, but I’m not your therapist, and I can’t ever be your therapist. You need professional help to deal with your trauma.”

Lots of space, no even hints of a relationship for a long time, (years). It takes a long time to heal from that level of trauma, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. If at the end of all that, he’s truly a new person, fully healed, and there is still a potential spark, then it’s a different situation.

But until then, And I do mean several years at least no relationship, trust me, you both will be better off.

PS, not sure if you’re also getting professional therapy, but if you can, do it. You very likely need it too, and I say that lovingly. I have received it myself and seen many people I know get helped by it.

Stay smart, stay safe, and best wishes.

I’ve been on 1080p since highschool, over 15 years, works perfectly for me. I value high frame rate over resolution/fidelity. Luckily for me, even mid-tier hardware is so powerful now, AAA games on ultra at 1080p can easily hit 160+

I have an AMD 6700XT and a 5800X3D with a 240Hz 1080p monitor, it’s wonderful for me.

The fact that you’re asking other people about this while being so concerned about all the red flags, is itself a red flag.

Think about it this way: If I wanted you to invest in some company, but I prefaced it with a long list of reasons why the company was really risky and not a wise choice to invest in, would you still invest your life savings into it?

I’ve known several people, men and women who dated somebody similar to your description, a tortured soul/bad boy or girl that was trying to get better. Do you know how many of them it worked out for? Zero, a zero percent success rate. Worse yet, all of them were hurt in the end by that person. It caused trauma, heartache, and in some cases, straight up abuse.

You shouldn’t get into a relationship with somebody who’s not fully healed. It is absolutely possible for people to heal from severe trauma and life circumstances, I’ve seen it happen. But until that happens, you shouldn’t get into a relationship with them. It’s a bad idea for both parties.

If they get therapy, work on themselves, become established, fix their issues, heal their wounds, and are like that for years consistently, then you can think about dating them. If they are truly on the right path, they will be completely fine with it working out or not at that time down the road.

If they aren’t alright with that, then it is a confirmation that they aren’t actually healed because they aren’t healthy enough to accept that happening. A mature and well-adjusted person is patient enough to wait, and mature enough to accept that different people’s lives sometimes go in different directions.

TL;DR Don’t do it. You almost certainly will end up hurt, worse off, and possibly even abused. You might also ruin their healing process unintentionally too.

Plasma has been pretty stable for the last several years I’ve been using it, especially X11. Wayland is buggier, but not terribly so, and it gets better all the time.

I’ve switched over to Wayland with Plasma now because it is stable enough for me now, I’m on Nobara.

I don’t really use Gnome, so I can’t speak to that experience.

If I were to vouch for a DE that is rock stable, it would be Cinnamon. I’ve never had any problems with Cinnamon. It’s not super pretty, and it’s a bit clunky, but if I want a DE that just works and gets out of my way, Cinnamon is my first choice.

It’s what I use for my business laptop, LMDE with Cinnamon, rock solid.

I should also add that I’ve always used fully AMD hardware, CPU and GPUs, and never brand new. Always a year or two old, so the Linux kernel has time to address bleeding edge bugs and such.

Also paid integrations into your existing environment.

Well you assumed my sex, but regardless, that claim is still disputed. Some research indicates that it does temporarily lower sperm counts.

None of that is particularly relevant though, because my family was claiming it would permanently cause me to become infertile.

Unclear, my grandma was a nurse. I thought she should have known better, but then again, maybe back in the day that was considered accurate advice medically.

Sitting in a hot tub as a kid will make you infertile.

Totally an old wive’s tale. I looked it up when I was an adult and found out I had been deprived of tons of hours of hot tub time.

No prob! Yeah I’ve been super happy with Invoice Ninja particularly, it’s a really solid piece of software.

Needs a NSFW tag! Soooo sexy!

For invoicing at my small business, I use Invoice Ninja.

Open source, self-hostable, and they offer cloud hosting. Free for the base version with less than 20 users. It has a bunch of features, you are able to create very professional invoices, define services and products, calculate taxes, fees, etc.

It’s very clean, fast, and intuitive.

For accounting, I use GnuCash. It’s old looking and clunky, but it has a bunch of features and works fine for everything I need.

Nintendon’t mind being total dickheads.

I’m happy for you, I wouldn’t wish it on people, it sucks.

So glad my job allows me to use Linux as my OS. I do IT, and everybody else in the company uses Windows.

Constant problems, brutal driver issues, OS crashes and lockups, software installation failures, hardware incompatibility problems, it’s awful.

Linux at work, Linux at home, such an improved experience.

I’ll still always love XP though, the last OS from Microsoft that felt like it had a soul.

I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about the Carbons, especially the older ones as Linux machines.

Fair point. Some folks are on an ultra tight budget or prefer the older model for various reasons.

But I agree, at $200-$300 used, you can’t really go wrong with the T480. Really nice specs for most use cases, and still fairly repairable and upgradable.

Not with the trackpad, but other issues yeah. For some reason, this model seems to be really finicky depending on the distro you use.

I had weird random issues with most distros I’ve tried on it over the years.

The two distros that have worked with almost no issues are Manjaro, and Mint Debian Edition, which is what I currently run on it.

The most frequent I had with it were random lockups when bringing it out of sleep mode.

Thinkpad A485. If you’re going used, I would grab a T460, T470, or T480. Really reliable models, all those can be had for $300 or less online, work great with Linux, and last forever. Plus they are decently repairable.

If new, I would also go with Framework laptops. Super repairable and sustainable. And very high quality laptops. My friend got one and it is super nice. Runs Fedora on it flawlessly.