My Thinkpad P1’s is soldered :( At least that came with a good Intel Wireless card.

But somehow on my T14s (a much smaller machine) it wasn’t soldered.

But then on the bigger T14 it is soldered. So I have no clue what is going on at Lenovo. At least the machines with good wifi cards are soldered, and the shit ass ones are

The key is you installed Kali in a VM. The true peak is installing it on bare metal and then using it as a normal computer.

Not all laptops have replaceable wireless cards. If you have a thinner machine they probably soldered it on. But I can’t find any rhyme or reason to what manufacturers do and don’t solder.

Even the shittiest of laptops a school district would buy new support windows 11. It’s only 7+ year old machines.

Those really low capacity cards have DIRE read speeds though. I wouldn’t want to cheap out too much on them.

We have one SD card at work that seemingly works fine, but has read speeds of like single digit Mbps. It’s plenty for the arcade machine it runs with no more than 10mb roms at the max. But oof is it bad.

FreeNAS was my first experience with that…

After dealing with that for a month I swore I’ll never buy a nother PC with a realtek nic. I think I spent like $50-100 more on my latest mobo in order to get Intel + Marvell instead of Realtek.

Realtek is just ass in general. I avoid them like the plague.

They’re OK in windows, but I have never had a good experience with them on Linux.

Bloat has a minimal impact on performance unless your system is seriously starved for resources.

It’s largely the magic of Proton, and everything that goes into Proton. DXVK runs on windows too and that alone can get you double digit performance improvements on the right games.

You can also just not activate it. There’s nothing stopping you from using the computer with the water mark. It’s not like XP which was super picky and would legit lock you out. Vista + just makes it kinda ugly but it works.

Unless you manually configured a bunch of things you shouldn’t need to do anything at all. AMD generally has great open source drivers so everything should just work™️

OP wants a “laptop Grade” processor which generally means x86. The pine tab has a rock chip arm CPU which is… dire? It’s 5 years old and even then was based on a like 7 year old process node. Very Linux first for an arm tablet, but not a laptop grade CPU.

Nvidia for compute* has always been fine on Linux. It’s Nvidia for an actual display that’s been the biggest problem.

Shit that beats out connecting my 90s serial equipped typewriter to use as a terminal output.

OK Mr no fun allowed.

At least swap usage is low.

If it’s an LSI card then make sure it’s either been flashed into IT mode, is capable of being flashed into IT mode, or is relatively modern and has that option built in.

What you really want is an HBA, but HBAs can be expensive, a raid card flashed to act as an HBA is typically much cheaper. A 6 gbit SAS card will do 3gbit sata, and no hard drive should be writing more than 3gbit. If you want to do SSDs then find a relatively more modern 12 gbit SAS card which will do 6gb sata.

I guess also look out for the REALLY old ones that won’t do over like 3tb. But I bought one of those for $20 almost 10 years ago so that shouldn’t be a concern. Those are probably all in the trash by now.

My work uses tailscale to get to work things. and I just want a VPN to get into my network at home. Maybe every once in a while connect to something like Mulvad. All 3 distinct programs that have virtually no idea about each other.

With OpenVPN just add as many taps as you need. With wire guard it doesnt way to play nicely with any other Wireguard VPNs running.

Can you run multiple wire guard connections simultaneously? The reason I stick with OpenVPN is because my work uses wire guard and I can run two connections at the same time.

I like how the website doesn’t even work anymore.

Something actually capable of doing this well? Even a raspberry pi would be better suited.