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)
@mcc hehe, welcome
we have outdated software but there's a lot of it and it mostly works
@mcc (you almost certainly want to run testing)
@whitequark hm
i was hoping that if i ever wanted to run anything not-outdated i could just do it in a flatpak
how hard is it to upgrade stable to testing once i'm in? it's just i've been in ubuntu 24 for a year and it's constantly dropping me new bleeding edge versions of things and s t u f f k e e p s b r e a k i n g
@mcc it depends, sometimes you do want it running natively
upgrading to testing is ~trivial
@whitequark ok. actually i guess here's the question, are they running different kernels
@mcc the kernel version is just whatever you install
nothing stops you from using stable kernel on testing, except systemd sometimes (but you should be fine)
@mcc i run a weird mix of stable+testing which works fine too
@mcc @whitequark sudo sed "s/stable {or bookworm i forget}/testing {or unstable if you're based}/g" /etc/apt/sources.list{,.d} or something