Waking up from sleep is of course part graphics card/drivers, and BIOS code. My husband had his share with his nvidia card crashing the system when coming up from sleep under Wayland, but I believe these things have been mostly ironed now. However, if you have a buggy BIOS, you’re out of luck. I’ve had such a DELL laptop, latest firmware installed, and no matter which distro I tried, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep properly. So, if that’s your issue, there’s not much you can do, apart from getting compatible hardware. There are hardware lists of compatible hardware in some places, including archlinux’s wiki i believe.

iOS is only massive in the US, everywhere else, Android has a huge market share.

Honestly, if these laptops also have Intel gpus, just use these to do your 2D work. And if you feel adventurous, then install the 390 drivers as secondary, only for the apps that need computing (e.g. Blender). For anything else, just use Intel, they work great for both video and 2D desktop acceleration.

That’s a rather expensive laptop you got there… I personally bought a used Thinkpad x280 for $160, and I run Linux on there. Another option is to get an small computer (sbc) with at least 8 gb of ram, if you already have a monitor.

It’s not working properly. No AAC support either. I also used to use the Dehancer plugin for it which unfortunately has bugs under Linux.

Resolve doesn’t do what Ableton does. It’s more of an audio processor and editor (like Audacity), but not a real DAW for music.

If you’re into gaming distros, another new kid on the block, based on Debian-Testing, is PikaOS. They have a KDE version.

There are several commercial options for Linux. The most-Ableton software out there is Bitwig Studio that has a Linux port. However, it’s expensive. The cheapest commercial solution, with a bit of learning curve but powerful nonetheless, is Reaper.

However, if you want to go 100% open source, there’s Ardour and LMMS (which is a lot like FL Studio). Ardour 9, which is expected by the end of the year, will be more MIDI-friendly than it used to be. LMMS latest git version (offered as binary on their site) has some good new features compared to their stable version, however, there’s still no vst3 support.

I’m an visual artist and I used Photoshop for years to edit my hand-painted scanned paintings. When I moved to Linux, and Gimp3 was out, I was finally ready to leave Photoshop behind. Some features of Photoshop aren’t there, but I was ready to leave them behind. Same with video, I used to have a rather popular blog about color grading with Resolve. I moved to kdenlive, which has none of these tools or plugins. It’s a decision that I simply had to make. I wanted to use foss tools, and that was the price to pay. I’m cool with my decision.

If you gotta go commercial, go with Reaper. The people (a small team of 3 or 4 I believe) behind it are really cool, and they’re doing it for the love of it, their profit is very small.

usb wifi dongles for $7 is the cheaper solution, not the internal module. I have some and they work fine with linux.

Jellyfin music server. It needs about 1.2 GB of RAM for itself, plus the system.

Yeah, snaps won’t be able to access the “external” codecs (outside their jail). So either install the official firefox package from the firefox site, or chrome.

You need to install the codecs, there’s a way to do it on ubuntu, just google search it (and there’s an option during installation to do it too). The N150 cpu and its integrated gpu is not a problem for your codec problem, it’s a matter of installing the right software.

The reality is, to get these Windows VSTs to work on Linux, is possible via 2-3 ways, but they’re crashy, and sometimes will work, and after an OS upgrade might stop working (as it happened last year with yabridge under ubuntu) etc. The truth is, you can’t rely 100% on these VSTs anymore under Linux, it’s too hairy of a situation overtime. You might be able to get it working for a project, and two years later to try to reload that project, only to have these plugins not working anymore, so the project would crash on you and not be able to load it anymore.

If you want to switch to Linux, you will need to use the well supported, native plugins only that get updated regularly for new linux versions. Yes, it’s a waste of money for your existing purchases, but this is what’s true for everyone who have ever bought Windows software in the past, and they’re now switching to Linux. Maybe you can sell them?

Alternatively, use Windows for your audio work, and if you want to stay on Windows 10, make sure that this computer is not on the internet connected anymore (due to not receive security updates anymore), and use Linux for your everyday computer tasks.

Trinity of course. That’s the point of low end computing with Q4OS. :)

I don’t think the difference between 32bit and 64bit is 2x in memory sizes, it’s way less than that. I run Q4OS, it runs at 350 MBs here.

Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom’s 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.

Yes, I have 2 computers running off of USB with Mint, with persistence. And I’ve set up that for my father in law and a friend too. You boot with one drive, you insert the other one, you UNMOUNT it, and then you load the installer. Please note though, that the bootloader will be installed into the internal drive instead of the usb one. To go around this problem, would be best to disable the internal drive temporarily during installation (either in the bios, or just remove its cable). Then the installer will be forced to write the bootloader on to the usb stick.

I usually set up the partitions as such: 1 GB of fat32 boot partition with the boot flag set, a 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).

You can install Mint on a usb drive, or external ssd. I personally run it on two of my machines where the internal drive died, on a usb stick. These wear out, but hey, for now, it works. So get a second usb, and install it there, or nuke Windows to get it to run well.

I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it’s very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.

I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.

Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it’s a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is). Your CPU scores 3500 points on the passmark cpu benchmark which is enough for any kind of distro. 15 years ago, the average laptop cpu was 600 points (and Linux still runs fine on these with something like Debian/Xfce).

The lowest ram usage I’ve seen with a full-fledge modern distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).

Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.

I think XFce supports quite a few themes for the window manager that completely changes how the window borders look like.