What's a laptop with an actual goodbios

I cracked out the dell latitude and decided to install arch on it, to make it simple the boot loader for this laptop is buggy and the USB's tend to show up on the boot loader whenever they feel like it, I tried all sorts of settings legacy bios, uefi secure boot disable, uefi with secure boot nothing seemed to help me get rid of the errors I kept. I tried updating the bios from a USB flashdrive, no luck their, i tried booting into the actual usb flash drive itself and using the tactic to update the bios on older Dell laptops from 2015 and later. After a while I said "fuarrrk it" and reinstalled windows 10 just to do it the easy way of just clicking the .exe and letting the dell software do it for me but still no luck there. TL:DR I'm planning on buying a laptop, old laptop I had just wasn't working well for me, whats a laptop with a reliable / easy to use bios and bootloader?

>>51377 >8450U They still use that BIOS menu today? It's kinda nice though and more settings than other laptops but dell is notorious for having slow boot. Does this show anything: # dmesg | grep SSS >updating the bios from a USB flashdrive You gotta restore to the bios factory settings after upgrades or there will be more bugs. >the USB's tend to show up on the boot loader whenever they feel like it That's like what laptops do most of the time. Try looking at the boot order of with $ efibootmgr if you could boot up a linux live distro just once. The problem is when your laptop still has the old efi bootloader for windows it will cause a glitch where the laptop tries to "fast startup/boot" which it tries to access the windows system that just did a "fake shutdown" recently so the laptop will try to access that hibernation file on the C:/ drive. You can of course just start fresh by formatting the /dev/sda1 (don't dd/rm the partition because that might wipe some efi variables or even bios firmware in rare cases). You should also try using different USB ports as laptops are notorious to have some USB ports disabled regardless of the "secureboot" setting. This was my problem when migrating to different OS with laptops, some USB ports don't work with bootable linux USB and some don't work with keyboard (when I was fixing laptops w/ broken keyboard). Other laptops also don't like to boot from USB device, they want a USB device that looks like a CD-ROM drive and there's also this thing where you have to press "Enter" to actually recognize the linux live USB. >easy to use bios and bootloader? I tend to avoid Dell an Asus due to buggy bios. Lenovo and Acer/Gateway usually do fine but modern devices have problem with linux I guess it's the very thing windows tried to do like not long ago I heard there were times windows wiped the linux partitions on some machines, they really want that laptop market stranglehold and has been a headache for linux and alternative OS since secureboot.

>>51410 >I heard there were times windows wiped the linux partitions on some machines Issue is I need a PC with some power, I'm gonna be rendering a lot of audio and throat fuarrrking it with a lot of CPU chugging VST's I can't have some weak thinkpad from the early 10s even if its reliable. >Lenovo and Acer/Gateway usually do fine I've read past stories from IT's / Bestbuy employees that they tended to try to stray people away from buying Acer laptops cause they were cheap and not made well, I guess a lot of the time 50% of the returns were always Acer products. I wanna keep privacy in mind but what I'm gonna be turning this Linux machine isn't is going to be mostly for music and art, thats the whole point of it, dont kill me lainons but I'm debating buying an older macbook for music prod, but, its apple end of story.

^^^^^^^^^^^ Continue Honestly lainions, I kind of miss being okay with using windows, I've had nothing but issues with Linux and so many hurtles just for a privacy boost cause honestly that's the only thing that I care about with Linux, its killed my creative flow, maybe I'm just bad at it, maybe its just not for me but all I know is its made computers for me stressful.

>>51440 If you're still having issues with linux then perhaps you just have a soykafty PC or something. Linux does everything fine with me, but to be fair that's because I stopped caring about playing most videogames and all the ones I play have ports. Use whatever OS best suits you, simple as though, I know you artsy types are practically slaves to proprietary software since Programmers != artists.

>>51442 > you artsy types are practically slaves to proprietary software I wouldn't say that at all, I've used Krita for a very long time and that's what most Linux users recommend, the only thing I use that can be called "proprietary" is Ableton. I don't use any of the adobe suite and never will, just has way to fuarrrking much soykaf that I just dont need. I tried Linux on more then one PC, I've bought laptops to try it out and I still keep running into issues but those things were so cheap they had issues of their own, I follow tutorials online perfectly I've trouble shot for hours staying up late at nights getting things working just for new issues to pop up the next day. Linux might be free, but its been costing a lot of my time I feel like, everyone I know who uses Linux says about how its super smooth and not buggy and it works easily but all its been is issues for me and its really, really frustrating and I think I have the right to be a little annoyed and angry.

>>51447 I did return those laptops and got my money back if it matters, I'm just saying that it's either I'm doing something seriously wrong or just really unlucky. Just the fact so many people love it, and have a lot of good experiences with it all its ever been for me is a huge frustration. I got a really good setup going on my second hard-drive, it was Pop-OS and KDE and it looked and was snappy and fast, all my software was ready to go but one day my microphone would just randomly start crackling. I spent hours and days trying to fix this issue, I bought a friend over of mine who is a linux fanatic who got me to try it out in the first place and she couldn't figure out what was wrong with it either.

>>51438 >I've read past stories from IT's / Bestbuy employees that they tended to try to stray people away from buying Acer laptops cause they were cheap and not made well Sounds like employee got paid to demote Acer since it doesn't even have strong grounds in the west although efficiency wise Acer is second to Samsung laptops. Acer has the best screens in the laptop world and I'm thinking on getting one for art but I kinda just want a external monitor since I've bad luck with laptop screens. Modern Lenovo or HP should do fine. Maybe getting a NUC would be the best option here. If you're going Mac just save up for a Mac M1 which has potential linux port. >>51440 If you're okay with installing Arch I think it's fine for visible media but Idk about audio, I'm not good at setting that up and either and I've heard there will always be some of latency and manual configuration. I couldn't even make midi playback work last I tried and only midi over VLC worked for me. Here's some artist using "arch" and "krita" https://www.davidrevoy.com/ (that's not me)

>>51450 >I kinda just want a external monitor since I've bad luck with laptop screens. I was thinking of that as well but I'd want an HDMI splitter or something so that way I can at least use the other monitor for windows and have a dual monitor setup and vice a versa for Linux. >Maybe getting a NUC would be the best option here. I was thinking of getting a NUC but my main idea what to be able to MOVE AROUND with my art and music not being limited to only my desk, I'm not sure about you but just being locked at my desk kills my work flow, it just distracts me. >If you're going Mac just save up for a Mac M1 which has the potential linux port. When I mentioned mac I wasn't talking about using it to build a Linux machine on it I was talking about using Mac OS for a daw I used to used called Logic Pro I still own it from back when I was a mac user a lot back in 2013. Is mac equally as worse when it comes to privacy and data collection as windows? I remember apples bragged about privacy them hit people with "oh btw we scan your icloud for cp" >If you're okay with installing Arch I think it's fine for visible media but Idk about audio I'm not sure if I'd go the Arch route anymore now that I've thought some things out about what I want to do with my Linux system (if i end up having one) I know there is distros bunded with things for artists (music or art) Fedora Design Suite that seems to be targeted way more towards photo shop and Ubuntu Studio and that seems to be more well rounded. I've always had issues with audio when using Linux in some way or another its quite annoying, when it comes to latency or setting up Midi I've yet to try it out on Linux cause I've just not gotten that far without other issues interfering with me. I feel like a lot of people who recommend Linux and praise it so much are coders or people who just surf the internet any maybe do some casual gaming here and there, I've never heard of an artist or a musician of actively recommends it besides unfa on youtube.

On machines that are compatible with Coreboot, you can choose between various options, including legacy mode Seabios (which you might recognize for its inclusion in many virtual machines) and UEFI compatible TianoCore. You can also add extra modules that are added to your boot options, you could have Tetris on your motherboard if you wanted for example.

>>51377 >>51438 >>51440 >>51447 >>51448 >>51471 >I can't have some weak thinkpad from the early 10s Don't rule out Thinkpads just yet, they often (always?) have socketed CPUs so you can upgrade to an i7 (it would need to be the right generation though). >all I know is its made computers for me stressful The initial learning curve is always going to have its challenges, I would try to take things easy if you can, if you rush and get stressed you won't have a good time. >everyone I know who uses Linux says about how its super smooth and not buggy Hardware support can make a sizable difference, so perhaps ask what they're running on. It's also likely that they've internalized the fixes to any problems they encountered, as is natural with any system that a person gets used to. >I think I have the right to be a little annoyed and angry Desktop Linux is 99% volunteer work, most funding goes towards server related tooling. Unlike with most proprietary software you have a direct line to the people who pour their free time into FOSS, so I would encourage you to be understanding. >I got a really good setup going on my second hard-drive, it was Pop-OS and KDE and it looked and was snappy and fast If you had a good setup then persevering was surely the answer? I bet there would of been a solution somewhere, even if it was unorthodox. >Is mac equally as worse when it comes to privacy and data collection as windows In many ways yes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r38Epj6ldKU is a good starting point), their privacy claims are just a marketing stunt. >I've never heard of an artist or a musician of actively recommends it besides unfa If you're looking for a community (which are honestly more equipped to help you out) then check out https://linuxmusicians.com and try asking for their help. I'm not going to kid you and pretend that Linux is the road most traveled, with any alternative to what's popular you're going to run into things you wouldn't otherwise. However, given that you care about your privacy I think you should keep at it, what seems hard at first becomes easier over time (and Linux itself evolves faster than you would imagine). Be patient, try not to get overly anxious and most importantly have fun. You can do it!

>>51484 I've looked at linux musicians in the past a lot before. The issue is everything in Linux is just a work around, bug issue or a free alternative that's just a shell of what its trying to be. But for some stupid reason I keep feeling drawn back to Linux even though its so soykaf, there i said it, its a soykafty operating system for people like me who want to make music. I'm just so frustrated, so very frustrated that no VST can work on Linux, Mac-OS as is has barley enough VST support and MAC OS is pretty popular, no dev will ever even THINK ABOUT!!! making big name plugins like Serum for Linux it will never happen. So i'm done trying Linux, its not worth the stress and time, I dont have 2 hours to trouble fix things all the time. admins delete this fuarrrking post

>>51493 Just use a mac ike all your musician friends. If you're lucky you'll be rich enough that you'll be able to keep up with the latest devices. And if you're normal person enough you won't have any secrets to hide. Heh, don't worry either, the ad algorithm knows when you've got secrets and adjusts for that too.

>>51495 It's not even like I have anything to "Hide" the onlything I could think of that would be weird if a fuarrrk ton of people found out about is the fact im something that rhymes with scurry but I never really talk about it unless I know someone is that as well. It's more the fact that just don't like how windows can update whatever it wants at any point, I also just dont like the idea of them being able to just look through all my soykaf its weird, I think thats a valid reason. Its why we have curtains in our house, we want privacy.

>>51471 Nothing wrong with a Mac machine if you treat it as a workplace PC and do nothing else with it. Windows is usually a waste and you'd probably be better off using Mac and not have to buy antivirus and data-recovery for when some malware gets in that windows PC which has the "insecure brand" as the revenue model, they intentionally make it worse so you'll pay these "vaccines and antivirus" software which actually is in close symbiotic relationship with the OS (they need windows to be insecure so those employees families don't just die of starvation). Linux is not at all bad, maybe the combination is use linux for internet (phone/android/tablet) you get the best security but maybe privacy as option if you want since google is really at top in security standpoint (but disappointingly at the bottom from privacy standpoint), on work/productivity side just use a mac or maybe just use a disconnected pc or laptop. Even XP with sai is good enough for paint and Vista with mixcraft for music although this is just a matter of ( technique > tools ) and sometimes it's actually about how much samples you have / theory / brushes you master. >>51493 Mac will always be at the top with audio, that is to say apple has the best aac codec and music ecosystem, macOS coreaudio is superior than whatever pipewire and windows has, and even the fact that a Mac supports DSD natively which even Linux can't do for the longest time (only DoP). Linux's attempt at being good with audio was pulseaudio despite it being already good enough at this point in time that it's used on expensive audiophile machines (with pulse and close source linux). pulseaudio tried to be coreaudio and recently its been superceded by pipewire which is an attempt to make "vst, bluetooth, midi, etc." work (what pulse didn't manage to do). It's a little bit late in the party but I guess it'll get there eventually. It was actually just a few years ago when paint software on linux became ideal, with krita and kde wacom (and recently xp-pen and other obscure tablets that got driver support).

>>51493 >>51498 >everything in Linux is just a work around, bug issue or a free alternative that's just a shell of what its trying to be I wouldn't describe it like that, Linux like any OS has its own way of doing things. To try Linux (or anything other than what you're used to) and expect it to work in the same way is unrealistic. There's always a learning process with unfamiliar tools. >its a soykafty operating system for people like me who want to make music I was giving you advice in the other thread and have to disagree, the fact that there's various communities for media production on Linux demonstrates that it is very much possible to use it for those purposes (and I should know). >no VST can work on Linux, Mac-OS as is has barley enough VST support and MAC OS is pretty popular I mentioned before that VST isn't the dominant format on Linux (and on Mac it's Audio Units), there are some vendors with Linux ports of their software (like PianoTeq IIRC) but without the desktop marketshare of Windows or Mac it doesn't financially make sense for most plugin devs. >making big name plugins like Serum for Linux it will never happen Vitalium which I mentioned in the other thread was heavily inspired by Serum, you might want to look into it. I think you're getting caught up in brand names and using the 'big popular VSTs' rather than thinking of plugins as tools to solve problems. I don't use any proprietary software in my workflow and because I understand the fundamentals of what I'm trying to do and which tools can do it I'm not handicapped as a result. >I also just dont like the idea of them being able to just look through all my soykaf its weird, I think thats a valid reason It absolutely is, fighting for your individual rights is a valid and just cause. Ultimately I think you're stressing yourself out and not giving yourself time to breathe and take things in. You can't expect to get everything right on your first try. Take it easy and try not to let your frustration compromise your beliefs about privacy, retreating back to what's comfortable and familiar is just playing into the hands of Google and co.

>>51448 >one day my microphone would just randomly start crackling Did you try changing your buffer settings in JACK? Those sound like xruns (clicks and pops when your computer can't process the audio fast enough).

>>51448 >Pop-OS started popping wasted pun jokes aside maybe it's clock desync? maybe there's multiple microphone / input resources and as far as I know chromium/gc usually has this hotword thing which even if you had used "linux distro" the mic would occasionally do it's own thing, classic botnet I would say. probably used for "relevant ads" like hearing your voice, assuming your gender/age profiles and whatever contents you're speaking of. MEDSTAKEN PROOF CLOSED BROWSER STILL HEARS YOU? (googleupdate.exe? maybe? but you agreed to terms of use legally speaking you installed that yourself!) https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=MFacwD-aRjM >youtuber: "I fuarrrking love soylent" >first ad: "nintendo switch" >another: "find local bulls in your area to satisfy your wife" >ad with black child home security system (for your wife's child) >pic related, filename related >youtuber: "don't understand what's that about" Ignorance is bliss but the experiment is at least "successful" to my standards. >finally another nintendo switch ad with 3d soyjak you can always check cat /proc/asound/card???/pcm???c/sub0/hw_params where ??? = some number, the pcm_c means it's a capture/microphone stream I think and pcm_p means it's playback and you can guess if there's multiple capture streams with different sample rate it might be what's causing the issue. I suggest stop using chrome if you do (ungoogled is fine though) https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/17/debian_chromium_hubbub/ WE live in the susciety

>>51507 I had someone tell me about Jack saying its more geared towards musicians and professional audio I'll give it a shot in the future as of now I have no Linux boot on anything.

>>51503 >Vitalium Woah dude that soykaf is exactly what I was looking for, serum is honestly 100% the main plugin I used to make music, I will defiantly check this out this takes a lot of weight off my chest ALREADY!!! The DAW isn't what I was so worried about honestly, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like I'm not upset that fl studio doesn't work properly on Linux I think I'm gonna look more into Bitwig. I think its time for me to step into creating my own sounds and not sticking to presets, I'm a damn synthwave / chill wave artist and still dont know how to make my own sounds, it should be good cause then I can make it sound exactly HOW I WANT!!! Maybe forcing myself to do things the more "hard way" and not sticking to these bigger name VST's that will be like training weights to force me to learn better for music creating.

>>51503 Found out the entire TAL plugin suite is available on Linux I'm so happy.

>>51531 >>51532 >>51533 >I had someone tell me about Jack saying its more geared towards musicians and professional audio This is correct, JACK is all about arbitrary routing (plugging things into other things) and low latency (which you can tweak extensively). There's a project called Pipewire that will unify JACK, ALSA and Pulse Audio into a single stack but personally I'm waiting for it to mature a bit more. >I think I'm gonna look more into Bitwig Hey, if it reduces your reliance on a fully proprietary toolchain then all the better. >I think its time for me to step into creating my own sounds and not sticking to presets Go for it! Synthesis is very rewarding when you start to grok it, you get so much creative freedom as a result. I recommend starting with subtractive synthesis (perhaps in a simpler synth like amsynth) so that you can get an understanding of the mechanics of it all, then you can expand to harder technologies such as FM synthesis. >Maybe forcing myself to do things the more "hard way" and not sticking to these bigger name VST's that will be like training weights to force me to learn better It's the difference between only knowing how to use a specific tool versus understanding the actual process behind it. Being able to translate your knowledge to different tools by having a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve is a great boost to your abilities and a skill worth honing. Good luck lain, I'm sure that you can do it!

>>51545 Pipewire is very bad and has massive distortion with 44.1kHz for some reason and they thought "let's just make everything 48000hz" to solve the issue with their inferior resampler. You can force it to natively use 44100hz by setting programs to use alsa and adding a 44100 to the allowed clockrates HOWEVER there is a massive distortion that goes off immediately the moment I switch on/off SoundTouch (pitch and speed shifter) that can kill your speakers and make you deaf even at lower than listening level (what the actual heck). I don't understand the advantage of pipewire spa-resample as it's very SLOW compared to other well-established resampler in existence. It's already giving me 100ms latency with just playing back a song natively at 44100 / s16 and I even have a one active plugin with nothing set which adds another 81.7ms as seen on the bottom left. I don't even get above 50ms latency with pulseaudio when I configure everything correclty. Something's definitely wrong with red hat / pipewire. I don't understand the reasoning behind this and while pipewire's resampler also gives me sad amounts of distortion when handling 44100 signal as attached on pic related, I used spa-resample -q 15 -f s16 -r 44100 input.flac output.flac sox even takes less than a second to process that same resampling command and gives me a clean output of the downsampled pcm file and as you can see on the evidence pipewire's resampler is having troubles handling computations with 48/96/192/384 --> 44.1/16 and they ain't fixing it because they just hide it by making 48/s24 the default. I'm worried since the downsampling to s16le is already bad and dirty enough to introduce heavy deafening distortion, if it's the same thing that upsamples all audio signal at 44.1/16 -> 48/24 I'm worried about the quality of how clean their resampling computation is, there almost exist tons of tools that takes less amount of time to resample, less latency, no distortion and yet the linux community decided to just go with the red hat bandwagon and introduce a "solution" that only introduced more problems for me and won't even let me change the spa-resample to something more sane like libsoxr, libsamplerate or libfsrc but nope they wont and it's now a fuarrrking dependency of kwin while pulse is being orphaned in arch/artix when the fact is it's so much better than pipewire in EVERY way when it's all about audio quality and not playing osu on linux while wearing sony bluetooth headphones.

>>51621 >spa-resample -q 15 -f s16 -r 44100 input.flac output.flac should be -q 10 -f s16 or -f s24 gives similar broken result Playing audio while turning on soundtouch plugin causes it to have a deafening glitch with 44100 native playback over alsa->pipe I have attached the file so you can reproduce the same result. spa-resample -q 10 -f s16 -r 44100 input.flac output.flac spa-resample -q 10 -f s24 -r 44100 input.flac output.flac

>>51621 >>51624 That is concerning. The only info I could find on the issue was here: https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire/blob/master/NEWS >An off-by-one error was fixed in the audio resampler that could cause distortion when downsampling. Maybe you should try the updated version and report the bug if it isn't fixed. I'm sure they wouldn't want to have a potentially physically harmful bug like that. Confirms my suspicions that there's still waiting to do before it's mature enough.