18hr of battery with the display off is a killer, and even if you could get an m.2 modem working in it m.2 modems tend to be far less efficient than the ones integrated to cell phone hardware. At least it my experience with Quectel and Sierra m.2 modems is representative of other brands.
I get what Canonical was going for with snaps but wow did they ever ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It used to be the clear choice for anyone who wanted a generic Linux where you don’t have to configure everything yourself. Sure some people didn’t like Unity but the core distro still worked well and was stable. With snaps, package management has become more complex than other distros while decreasing performance if memory limited (and who isn’t nowadays). The number of times I’ve had something not work in the “stable” snap package is far too many, and it’s pretty much always fixed by installing the same package with apt.
I get the reasoning for sandboxing applications, but they needed to wait until it was more stable to make the default. At this rate I doubt we’re ever going to get a truly mainstream desktop Linux distro rivaling macos and Windows…
Indeed it’s misleading wording but credit where credit is due, this is far better than turning them all into e-waste. It’s not like anyone bought these with the assumption they would have any sort of official API someday, especially after seeing how Sonos handled their similar situation…
Full Windows 8.1 thanks to Intel’s x86 tablet push at the time.
Windows RT never made it to any other devices besides the Surface RT iirc and was pretty much an immediate failure.
They made so many terrible Windows 8.1 tablets which they had to support. I used one of these with an atom z3735f and 2GB of RAM as my only Windows computer for a long time, and Windows 8.1 was completely smooth on it despite the anemic hardware. Some even cheaper tablets and mini PCs released with 1GB RAM and 16GB emmc yet somehow also were also able to run Windows 8.1 okay.
If I were in this position I’d strongly consider using 16GB for the next year or two. Especially with an NVME SSD, good swap performance makes the impact of running out of memory much smaller than it used to be.
It’s very strange both sticks failed at the same time, have you tried them in another motherboard?
This is almost certainly US Mobile. They have some really interesting plans at surprisingly reasonable prices. But ultimately if you just want the cheapest cell service then they’re not the carrier for you.
All web browsers are nearly unusable with 4gb of RAM lately. Even with desktop Linux I usually have nearly my full 8gb used. With 8gb AND Windows it’s only a matter of time before these computers become unusable…
Company computers often come with pre-installed spyware which is notoriously RAM hungry. My company laptop immediately after boot uses nearly a full 16gb before you open any programs. Luckily our IT department realizes this and only allows us to purchase machines with 32GB and up. They’re probably not happy with the current prices, but being a F500 company they can afford it…
There’s huge investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing in China, but they’re certainly not ahead of the West yet. Or even on par. If they were we’d see them exporting semiconductors and not buying from foreign companies, yet they still do. I work as an electrical engineer in the semiconductor industry and also visit China for work. We all know that our jobs are doomed in 5-10yr, but for now their domestic semiconductor industry simply isn’t able to compete.
Snaps bundle dependencies and sandbox applications. The dependencies aspect is what matters more to me, but apparently there’s also security benefits if you were to try to install a malicious program.
You can remove snapd, doing so also removes a number of built in apps. But at that point you may start questioning why you’re not just using Debian stable and add the stuff you want. Both of these options pretty much defeat the point of what Ubuntu was.