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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?

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

amazon.ca/Deal4GO-Heatsink-5B4

This looks good! Oh, they're out of stock. Except wait, why doesit say "replacement"?

I watch installation instructions

youtu.be/8sm1ScVUHqY?t=108

Is there a hd heatsink strip in my friggin laptop already?? (1/2)

www.amazon.caDeal4GO M.2 2280 SSD Thermal Heatsink Pad 5B40Z68852 Replacement for Lenovo Thinkpad T16 P16s Gen 1, T14 X13 T16 T14s Gen 3, X13 T14 Gen 4, T14 T16 Gen 2 : Amazon.ca: ElectronicsDeal4GO M.2 2280 SSD Thermal Heatsink Pad 5B40Z68852 Replacement for Lenovo Thinkpad T16 P16s Gen 1, T14 X13 T16 T14s Gen 3, X13 T14 Gen 4, T14 T16 Gen 2 : Amazon.ca: Electronics

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…

amazon.ca/s?k=m.2+thermal+pad&

(c) set the computer preemptively on fire, so that the hard drive can't be the one to overheat it

(2/2)

www.amazon.caAmazon.ca : m.2 thermal pad

Update: Fuck this town i'm out

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
> I've only had a couple of cases where the distro release upgrade actually worked and left me with a functioning OS afterwards

True! That's a missing stair I'm so used to, that my habit has been to keep my OS on a separate partition from /home. So I can just do a fresh install of the OS whenever there's a new version.

@mcc

@mcc @strypey so much stuff to reinstall, there's stuff I've built manually or had to modify or whatever, specific tools I won't remember the name of when I next need it (but can find through checking which I have installed), often config files are in /etc or other locations than /home so there's a bunch of reconfiguration that always needs doing.

Strypey

(1/2)

@gsuberland
> so much stuff to reinstall

Ae, it's a pain. Like a normal update, A GNU/Linux upgrade ought to be able to reliably carry over personal files *and* configuration, without a reinstall.

@mcc

(2/2)

It's like we need a concept of an OS interface as a digital hotdesk.

Our desktop, our personal files + configuration (natives apps, browser profiles, customisations, etc) is stored on our own machine. Currently we only login to it from our own machine.

But what if we could plug a boot USB into any computer, anywhere in the world, boot into GNU/Linux, and login to our own desktop. Digital hotdesking!

GNU GUIX is working on a distro that would facilitate this, with only Free Code.