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Okay. Please help me as I ask COMPUTER BABBY QUESTIONS.

I have a Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 (AMD).
It has a 256 GB HD. That's too small. I want to buy a new, bigger one. I have a sense the good hard drives these days are "M.2".

Lenovo's specs page

lenovo.com/ca/en/p/laptops/thi

doesn't say anything about "M.2". It says the hd is "PCIe".

I run "lshw" to see what's on the computer. It says "NVMe".

How do I find out the bestest fastest aftermarket drive Canada Computers carries that my computer will support

I only understand computation as the MANIPULATION OF ABSTRACT PLATONIC FORMS. I do not understand this realm where computers are "physical objects" you manipulate with "screwdrivers". I would prefer to use Math to translate my thoughts directly into action, as if I am casting magic spells

Okay thank you all for explaining. I have one more question: Is there actually, like, a difference between drive vendors. Like if I pick WD vs Samsung vs Lexar (vs… "crucial"?!) will it ever make any difference

Okay. So I think I have my plans for the hard drive complete. Now here's the shedpainty question:

The old drive has Ubuntu 24.04 on it. I hate it.

Should I trade down to Debian?

Or should I trade up to Pop!_OS?

Will I regret either of these? Will either one, if I just go get a standard usb key installation, cause driver problems with my AMD chipset or secure boot or whatever other junk Lenovo has on board?

@mcc I jumped ship to Pop! OS after Ubuntu went to snaps. I absolutely love it.

Pop is a bit opinionated, but I got used to its defaults. (E.g. "super+B" to open the browser, rather than "super+2" to open the second item on my dashbar.)

One problem: Pop ditches grub for systemd boot, which gave me problems with a triple-boot setup. I would expect this to be the biggest possible source of friction. I ended up fixing it in my mobo's BIOS

mcc

@lynndotpy hm, I'm not overly fond of grub, it doesn't actually support my screen resolution well