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
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. 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?
Okay I have more computer build babby questions
I got a hard drive
But I've been warned it's one that runs hot
So I think I want a thermal "strip", which is apparently a heatsink that fits into smol spaces like a laptop
I google
https://www.amazon.ca/Deal4GO-Heatsink-5B40Z68852-Replacement-Thinkpad/dp/B0CDSBKD1X
This looks good! Oh, they're out of stock. Except wait, why doesit say "replacement"?
I watch installation instructions
https://youtu.be/8sm1ScVUHqY?t=108
Is there a hd heatsink strip in my friggin laptop already?? (1/2)
I only want to open up the laptop once. Trying to decide if I should
(a) just open it and assume there's already a heatstrip
(b) I poke around and there's lots of weird blue polymer strips that seem to do the same thing? It wouldn't be that expensive to just buy one and have it around if it turns out there's not one in there already…
(c) set the computer preemptively on fire, so that the hard drive can't be the one to overheat it
(2/2)
Alright one last shedpainting question. Should I install Debian Stable or Debian Testing. Text replies welcome
@mcc Stable tends to have somewhat outdated packages (often surprisingly so; I've seen some more than a year behind with missing backported patches for critical security issues) but there's less day to day hassle with updates breaking things.
Testing is much more up to date but generally works without too much hassle. If you don't keep on top of updates it does become progressively harder to update, but this is generally true for most non-LTS distros anyway.
I'd err towards Testing.
@mcc one thing that does tick me off a bit about Stable is that I've only had a couple of cases where the distro release upgrade actually worked and left me with a functioning OS afterwards. maybe it got better on the desktop release in recent years but the last time I tried on Debian Server was just a year ago and it broke (I had to roll back my snapshot). I've tried it a bunch of times over the years on the desktop and server distros and I'd estimate my success rate at about 15%.
@gsuberland Huh. So in that sense the "rolling" testing distro might actually be nicer because the upgrades come in more smoothly.
@mcc yeah, you run into more things misbehaving but it's rarely a fully system-breaking bug.
@gsuberland
> you run into more things misbehaving but it's rarely a fully system-breaking bug
I was using LMDE for a while, which is based on Debian Testing. Never had any noticeable issues, it was great. Never used Debian Testing directly though.