You can get a USB IR receiver and use software like LIRC to map the inputs of basically any remote you have. Setting it up takes a little effort, but it works great when it's done.

I've used LIRC in the past. Takes a bit of setup, but it works well once you get it going.

Until then, a Raspberry Pi or SFF PC will do the job just fine. They even work with remotes if you get an IR receiver for them.

It isn't recommended, but dpkg will install it if you really want to. You just need to handle dependencies manually.

But it's a pretty rare issue. If something isn't available in the official repo, AUR probably has it.

The Fossify forks of simple apps should be coming soon too, if you want to stick with something familiar. They've already released their calendar, gallery, and file manager, the rest should be ready pretty soon.

It isn't just you, it failed on me enough times that I'll never touch it again. I either manually install raw Arch, or use EndeavourOS instead for a "lazy" install.

It does, but it's done me wrong a few times so I never recommend it. For all I know it's fine these days, but old grudges are hard do shake.

My daily driver right now is an old Lenovo Ideapad (50-70 I think) with EndeavourOS, I have a few other assorted Thinkpads and Ideapads running mainly EOS or Arch, and home servers running Arch. I use Arch btw.

The "backup" laptops are flexible though, I distro-hop on them fairly often. Older Lenovos are usually great for Linux compatibility.

I prefer private, but only a few that aren't to crazy with the rules. Ratio is easy enough to maintain with some freeleech torrents set to seed forever, all other torrents get set to whatever the minimum seed requirements are. The selection, quality, and speed are so much better that I don't mind putting in that little bit of effort. Public trackers are my last resort.

That said, any torrents are secondary to Usenet. That subscription is worth every damn penny.

If you want to "upgrade" a bit, sewing needles work much better than toothpicks. And they're almost as cheap.

They sell $700 wheels, $1000 for an accelerometer isn't really a surprise.

It used to be completely busted, but I've heard that support is getting better. Recent kernels and mesa have been updated to support them, but the Intel drivers are way behind what Windows gets.

Non-gaming use could be fine, I'm planning on trying one myself soon.