Jay

That’s actually similar to how I got one of my friends on it. I got a Framework 16 about a year ago and installed Linux on it with a very customized KDE DE and he seemed pretty interested in it whenever I brought it with me whenever we hung out. Offered him a hand in learning more about Linux, how to install, customization, different distributions, Steam Proton, etc. About 7-8 months after and he has a Framework 13 with Fedora Linux.

My other friends are just stuck on the gaming side of things sadly. The games that I dropped when I made the switch I really didn’t care a whole lot about anyways. Not the case with my other friends though.

However, I have my brother and my parents using it for their laptops as they don’t need it for anything else but a web browser and an office suite and over the last year or so there have been no complaints!

I wish I could get my friends to switch. I even had one tell me they would rather use it if supported the games that don’t work (which of course are games with anti-cheat issues). But they at least recognize that Windows is getting quite bloated

I mean they aren’t going to blow AMD or Nvidia out of the water, certainly not in the high end cards. But from my experience with my Intel Arc A770 LE 16GB under Linux. It’s been amazing.

Pretty much zero driver issues, 2K completely max settings at or really close to 60fps in all of my games I’ve tried. All for $350 (But that I’ve seen as low as $260 for the non LE versions in store before GPU pricing skyrocketed again)

I’m all for Intel going in with the B series, especially if it’s as plug and play as my A770 is with Wayland using the Mesa driver and has more performance to compliment.

This is really interesting! I’ve usually installed Winaero Tweaker back when I still used Windows, if I knew this existed I probably would’ve gone with this instead. Having access to “playbooks” would be quite handy.

Seconded on Bandcamp, though I don’t stream through it. I just buy albums and play them on whatever music player I have installed. Usually VLC or Amarok!

That is exactly how the webcam light is setup in a Framework. The light is wired up to the camera sensors power, so whenever the camera has power, so does the light. The switch also fully disconnects it from the computer itself. At least in Linux, you can verify it using lsusb. You can see the camera indicated as Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Laptop Camera. Whenever the switch is flipped though, it disappears all together from the list.

The main things that use up a lot of VRAM for me is definitely doing Blender rendering and shader compilation for things like Unreal Engine. My games probably would use a little more if I had any screen higher than 1080p. The most usage I’ve seen from a game was around 14Gb used

I haven’t messed around with llms on the card just yet but I know that Intel does have an extension for PyTorch to do GPU compute. Having the extra VRAM would definitely be of help there

That’s pretty much the lowest that I’ve found too.

From what I could find, this is the lowest price per GPU manufacturer (For 16GB of VRAM)

• Intel Arc A770: $260
• Radeon RX 7600XT: $320
• NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti: $450

You make a very good point there. I’d probably be more inclined to allow ads on YouTube if they weren’t so intrusive to my privacy and weren’t trying to push scams or overly sexualized mobile games every 4 seconds. (Although I’m not sure if it’s still that bad, I completely uninstalled the YouTube app after it got that bad and exclusively use FreeTube now).

The YouTube premium subscription also seems like quite a bit. $13.99 for that and YouTube music, I don’t want YouTube music, I just want no ads.

As a Linux user of an Intel Arc card. I can safely say that the support is outstanding. In terms of price to performance, I think it’s pretty good too. I mainly enjoy having 16GB of VRAM and not spending $450-$500+ to get that amount like Nvidia. I know AMD also has cards around the same price that have that amount of VRAM too though

Which is why I would rather go with spending my money on YouTubers via things like Patreon, Kofi, GitHub Sponsers or even just get some merch. I would much rather go that route than spend money on YouTube to just not have ads. Yes, it’s a subscription, but at least from one of the creators that I watch, even just 1 dollar a month is much more money than what they get from ad revenue from a single person

I’ve had weird Linux issues similar to that before. However, I’ve also had weird Windows issues too where it didn’t “just work”. I’ve had 2 experiences that really stick out to me with Windows

The first was Intel ARC, I absolutely love the card I have and was using it on a dual boot system. Linux ran it like a dream under Mesa, I just had to install a few more packages to get GPU compute for things like Blender. But Windows was an entirely different story. The driver worked great but Windows update was the absolute worst thing to ever come out of this. I’d have my driver all up-to-date and Windows update would come along, and completely downgrade my driver, to this one specific driver (I don’t remember the exact version) that didn’t even support Intel ARC Control. It would do this randomly too, sometimes during a game, or during Blender renders which caused those things to crash and waste hours of time. It also had a 50% chance to just completely blue screen my system, which lead to a broken/incomplete driver install. It was a mess

The other was with a friend’s laptop I was helping repair. It was running Windows 11 and kept blue screening left and right for what seemed like RAM and driver issues. Tried switching out the RAM sticks, ran Memtest86, all tested good. Tried a new SSD and a fresh install of Windows 11, same issue even before any drivers were even installed. Tried the same thing but with Windows 10 and it worked flawlessly. The laptop had full support with Windows 11 and no workarounds was necessary but Windows 11 just didn’t work at all.

Not to say that Linux has been a smooth ride the entire time, far from it. But Windows has been pretty much the same from my experience in terms of weird bugs and crashes.

TL;DR: I’ve had my fair share with Windows shenanigans, been way too many times where it didn’t “just work” as much I would’ve liked. From GPU drivers to the entire OS.

Chromium alone depends on if it’s the Google version or the Un-Googled version. For the Google version of Chromium, it still has that hangouts extension. However, the Un-Googled Chromium has that extension removed via the build flags, the one to note is enable_hangout_services_extension=false.

As others have said though, it can also depend on what other Chromium-based is being used. Some browsers like Brave and including Vivaldi can have this turned off in the settings. Others like Edge and Opera are affected as well. However it doesn’t affect every Chromium-based browser.

My biggest issue with Windows (at least on my desktop) is with my GPU driver for my Intel Arc A770 LE. Windows Update will not stop automatically “updating” my driver to a driver that was made about a year and a half ago. It’s too old that Intel Arc Control doesn’t even work with it. It doesn’t matter how I install the latest driver from Intel, I can DDU the old one, install the driver and wipe all custom configurations or just install it normally. Nothing works, upon the next reboot, it automatically says “there’s an update” and installs regardless if I want it or not. The driver installation also has a 50/50 chance of blue screening my whole system when installing, both the installation from Windows update, and from Intel. The Window driver “updates” for my driver have also just happened randomly with no notice, they’ve occurred during hour long Blender renders, crashing it and wasting hours of my time redoing work. (This is all on Windows 10). It is frustrating to deal with

Meanwhile, my Linux install on the same computer just runs mesa and I’ve had no issues at all with my GPU. (Or any issues with drivers really, it all just works).

Although it didn’t “kill” my computer. Whenever I still used Windows, it would spontaneously install this outdated driver which would either blue screen or crash whatever I was in the middle of doing such as working in Blender, playing a game, etc.

Seconded on this one. I use Yattee with Piped as my frontend, with an account as well, and it’s been pretty solid so far.

Right!? It’s insane how much data they pull from you and just the shear amount of trackers in general

I know others have said previously, but for me I hate the amount of tracking and targeting that gets thrown into the ads that try to pull as much personal information from you as possible so they can make every cent from that info. I like to keep my life as private as I can online. YouTube by no means has any respect for that.

Having an ad here and there wouldn’t normally bother me so much if it also wasn’t for the complete lack of filtering YouTube does on what ads are “acceptable”. So many ads have been misleading, contain false information, and are just down right inappropriate. An ad for a product is fine but I really don’t want to listen to another ad with an AI voice telling me to buy a product that is a blatant scam. If they are this strict on making creators follow the YouTube Guidelines, they should make ads follow them too.

I do understand that things aren’t free and I do support the creators I watch with buying merch or through donations, wherever that may be (KoFi, Patreon, etc). I would pay for YouTube premium but it’s just way too much money for the little that I would actually benefit from it. I don’t need or want YouTube Music. I just don’t want to have ads. But for $18.99 a month, no thank you.

TL;DR: Too much tracking and privacy invasive, ads don’t follow YouTube’s own guidelines and too expensive just to simply stop ads.