NordVPN literally will not let me delete my account. My 3 years is over, there is no method to delete when signed in to their site. You have to fill out a form with your payment details and shit to "verify your identity" (who remembers that shit from 3 years ago).

Literally emailed from the email associated with the account, called, logged in, etc. they won't delete it until I send my credit card info in the clear, over insecure email.

FUCK NORDVPN

I wonder if thats because most of the traffic was just bots all along who obviously aren't going to leave in protest

Ultra 7 155H with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and eight graphics cores; or an Ultra 7 165H with the same number of cores but marginally higher clock speeds.

WTF is Intel smoking with these naming schemes I can't even understand what this means. Thank fuck AMD is an option.

Hey Proton how about you quit privacy-washing and actually prioritize and release feature parity products for Linux so your customers aren't being herded onto windows' data harvesting platform just so they can use your supposedly privacy forward products

Just go PC and don't worry about corporate lifecycles anymore

I have a very similar use case so here is my opinion.

HARDWARE

-No dGPU unless this is your PRIMARY gaming computer. (Reason: better battery life, lighter laptop, with recent AMD iGPU you have decent performance for non-VR/not massive openworld AAA games.)

-recent AMD CPU. (Reason: better performance to watt ratio than Intel which makes a big difference for most of your use cases. Better multi-core performance which makes compiling code much faster. Massively better iGPU for light-medium duty gaming.)

-atleast 16GB ram if not expandable but as much as you can reasonably budget.

-16:10 or taller aspect ratio screen (16:9 sucks on laptop size devices, the extra height makes a big difference for school, coding, browsing, pretty much everything but watching 16:9 movies)

-Resolution: personal preference. IMO 1080p or 1920*1200 for 16:10 is ideal for 14" and below laptops. Lower resolution means better battery and on a small screen the PPI is high enough. If you are OK with a trade off of battery life and want a super crisp display then 2K is the highest I would go. 4K is retarded on laptop sized screens unless you are plugged in 90% of the time and you'll have to fuck with scaling then.

-metal body for stiffness and durability

-decent key travel (usually longer travel means better IME)

If you want to do machine learning/AI work professionally I use and recommend investing in a dedicated desktop with a large memory nvidia (cuda cores) GPU and installing the cuda drivers. Trying to cram commercially viable ai hardware into a laptop is a losing battle and you'll end up with a worse experience for both use cases, wont be able to fit large models in the memory anyways, and end up buying a desktop for AI while being stuck with a laptop that is worse for laptop use)

SOFTWARE

#1 Nobara OS KDE - best OOB experience for gaming IMO. Easy transition from windows. Has kernel fixes and many laptop specific fixes (asusctrl for example) by default which means you have a good chance of extra features like LEDs, fingerprint, etc working without tinkering). Fedora based.

#2 Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE6) - best non-gaming distro to learn and grow into IMO. Access to deb packages. Stable. (nobara has been stable for me as well, but it is LMDE's bread and butter). Ease of transition from windows. Can game just as well if you are capable of following simple instructions to configure the stuff done by default on nobara and pop (may need to manually change kernels, drivers, etc to get the best performance on new hardware)

#3 Pop_OS - used it for years, but I prefer Nobara after comparing. Ubuntu based so you have access deb packages without ubuntu's bullshit. Setup out of the box for gaming. I got fed up with failed updates, broken packages, and sluggishness so I swapped to nobara which has been a treat.

EDIT: you can snag some good deals on amazon warehouse deals (used-like new) laptops. These are usually just open box returns and if there is anything wrong you have 30 days to return it.

I recently upgraded to an Asus vivobook S 14x OLED (M5402R) for $780 CAD ($580USD) with a ryzen 7 6800H, 16GB DDR5, a 1TB gen 4 nvme, and it has zero signs of use, slight coil whine under load that I can only hear if I put my ear next to the keyboard and don't have any sound or music on (I suspect this was the reason for the return on mine since its a common complaint for this model. That's what I was hoping for since I'm not that picky and its worth the steep discount IMO.) Everything works oob on Nobara. I believe lenovo also regularly heavily discounts their previous gen thinkpads which are a great option, although the AMD configs are rare. Good luck!

Constant cunty moves like this is why I will not spend one fucking red cent on anything Nintendo ever again.

Yet again, this was not impacting their business/profits in any way shape or form, if anything it helps keep their brand relevant, and they still fuck it up for everyone.

Pirate everything Nintendo.

Retroarch + Vimm's lair is one good source for ROMs for those starting out.

1000% pixel 8 + grapheneos.

Sauce: former Samsung user tired of the bloatware, spying, terrible battery life due to constantly running bullshit in the background, etc. who moved to a pixel 8 + grapheneos. The experience is night and day and its quite liberating to finally feel like I own my phone and not the other way around.

Ya simple solution: don't buy no-name chinesium crap regardless of the storefront and you won't be disappointed

Man this seems like a great target for Anonymous to permanently cripple... 🙏🏼

This sounds like tech-bro RSS.

Casually Explained as relevant as ever

"Fully anonymous"

"will track IP"

"Have my word I do no track or log IP address"

"I will track IP addresses"

Wow is this the first time a dev advertising anonymous software has admitted they plan to sell their userbase (once that userbase builds their content for them enough) right off the bat?

Its like a enshittification speedrun

For the downloading media part:

The *arr stack is what you're looking for + Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).

Prowlarr: manage your indexers

Radarr: find/automatically download movies

Sonarr: find/automatically download tv shows

Jellyfin: streaming your media

Look up trashguides for setting up all this stuff, very detailed guides. They are compatible with torrents and Usenet. I like using docker with portainer for easy management and if you use a VPN container you can selectively route these containers through the VPN so your other services that dont require the VPN dont need to route through it.

Fair but thats your choice to upgrade. No one says you have to, and they don't lock games behind needing insert current gen CPU or gpu

Umm what? Most of the comments there are telling them to get lost? Seems like them defederating for every little reason rubbed the rest of the fediverse the wrong way

Ya they can fuck right off with 250 watts

I can vouch for airvpn if any of you poor saps need to get one. I've been through several and settled on airvpn in the end.

General rule if you see YouTube sponsor ads for a VPN steer the other way. (IE Nord, Surfshark, etc.)

Wow sounds like Quax is a dumbass. "A lot if you're not a pussy." is my usual answer

Looks great! Do you have any close up shots of the lugs?