I don't think the bad sound is necessarily deliberate, its more of a casualty of TV's becoming so very thin there's not enough room for a decent cavity inside.

I had a 720p Sony Bravia from around 2006 and it was chunky. It had nice large drivers and a big resonance chamber, it absolutely did not need a sound bar and was very capable of filling a room on its own.

A dedicated GPU is a red flag for me in a laptop. I do not want the extra power draw or the hybrid graphics sillyness. The Radeon Vega in my ThinkPad is surprisingly capable.

For me it's a necessity to run the software I need to do my work (CAD design)

Dedicated GPUs in gaming laptops are a necessity for the IT industry, as it forces manufacturers, assemblers and software makers to be more creative and ambitious with power draw and graphics software, and better optimal usage of available hardware resources (e.g., better battery and different performance modes to compensate for the higher power consumption due to the GPU; so a low-power mode enabled by casual user will disable the dedicated GPU and make the OS and apps dependent on the integrated GPU instead, but same/another user using same PC can switch to dedicated GPU when playing a game or doing VFX or modeling).

Without dedicated GPUs, we consumers will get only weaker hardware, slower software and the slow death of graphics software market. See the fate of Chromebooks market segment - it is almost dead, and ChromeOS itself got abandoned.

Meanwhile, the same Google which made ChromeOS as a fresh alternative OS to Windows, Mac and Linux, is trying to gobble the AI market. And the AI race is on.

And the result of all this AI focus and veering away from dedicated GPUs (even by market leader nVidia, which is no longer having GPUs as a priority) is not only the skyrocketing price hikes in hardware components, but also other side effects. e.g., new laptops are being launched with NPUs which are good for AI but bad for gaming and VFX/CAD-CAM work, yet they cost a bomb, and the result is that budget laptop market segment has suffered - new budget laptops have just 8GB RAM, 250GB/500GB SSD, and poor CPU, and such weak hardware, so even basic software (MS Office) struggles on such laptops. And yet even such poor laptops are having a higher cost these days. This kind of deliberate market crippling affects hundreds of millions of students and middle class customers who need affordable yet decent performance PCs.

Same here... I do not wish for a laptop with >65W USB-C power requirements.

Yea I agree it's not worth it to have a igpu a dedicated. If I'm correct in what you are talking about. There's always issues with that setup in laptops. But I'd stay away from all laptops at this point until we get an Adminstration that enforces anti trust. All manufactures have been cutting so many corners, your likely to have hardware problems within a year unless it's a MacBook or a business class laptop.

I imagine because vsync and triple buffering introduce latency. There are cases like games where you don't want all that lag.

If the goal was to reduce latency, wouldn’t you want the desktop compositor out of the way when vsync is on?

That's very true, and I believe Wayland has a DRM leasing extension just for this use case. SteamVR uses it to punch through the compositor and draw straight to the screen.

Its old enough to use a CFL backlight and those turn yellow with age.

Thanks ;)

Perhaps on the same package (stacked) but absolutely not on the same die.

You use PDO and prepared statements. Although realistically, you are going to be using a framework and some kind of Active Record pattern.

I've been running Fedora at home for about a decade now, and I've been doing my gaming on it for the majority of that period.

I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.

The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.

To not bottleneck the mechanical hard drives in their NAS, or to download games at a reasonable speed.

Or even just work stuff, I've had to shift around several TB of 3D assets for my job while working from home.

Microsoft's understanding of consent is about on-par with that of a rapist.

I say this about advertising and after recently using Win11 for the first time to remove malware, I was left with a gross feeling. My friend whose computer it was is not highly PC literate, but when I was talking about the AI shit built in to these platforms, you could see the disgust building.

I did this. Got a new old stock unit for 300GBP, its got a SDM slot for gen8 Intel systems and Pi compute boards.