Re: HDD Fidget Toys

Apparently, some coatings on some platters may be somewhat not very good for humans. Carcinogens and such. Exercise caution and don’t lick the platters.

Source: Verbal warnings from my local hard drive aficionados, with like half a century of combined experience herding large flocks of hard drives. Don’t cite me, just don’t lick your platters. Remember to wash your hands after you’ve done the deed and finished screwing.

I’m assuming you use DisplayPort? Try using an HDMI output if possible.

I both agree with you, and kinda disagree.

If you venture into installing Flatpaks on such a system, just keep in mind that:

• Auto updates must be on
• The Maintainer of the Flatpak in question must be expected to provide security updates for the next five years or so. Personally, I’d only use it for packages provided directly by project maintainers (i.e. Dropbox from Dropbox Inc. as packaged by Dropbox Inc.).

Keep in mind, like 95% of normal people (we are not normal) don’t know what a package manager is and only use

• ”The internet”
• Webmail
• Google Docs
• Spotify

For that, we need the default desktop install and the Spotify app (probably a Flatpak). That’s about it. It’s a glorified web browser with batteries. Treat it that way and keep it that way, unless your SO has any specific needs and requirements.

The limited and dated package set is kind of a feature. Only packages that should work until the laptop breaks, and only packages that won’t change randomly when you update (mostly).

I’m gonna be the boring guy.

RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)

Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.

Benefits:

• Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
• Actually works
• Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
• If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
• Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.

Drawbacks:

• Boring (for you)
• Not ideal for gaming

If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.

Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.

Have you met out lord and saviour COBOL?