I cannot find the reference to the port being flimsy. I did however find the part where the top hotswap component (touchpad and the place where the plate is) is having problems. The only side port that they mention is the charging port. But the again, as I said, the firmware must be redone to account for said removeable dGPU. Now you may be wondering how big of an effect does it make when adding removeable dGPU. Off the top of my head, the motherboard must have the power supply circuitry remade to account for the additional power draw when needed. That alone will make the firmware for power control need to be redone. It can have wide range of effect for other components too because power firmware is really far reaching and may break assumption in other firmware. Not to mention a part of the cooling system is also removeable now. Framework has gone out of their way trying to invent a new standard for removeable dGPU on a laptop.

Btw, here is the quoted article that mentions the side port.

Twice, the touchpad suddenly stopped scrolling and stopped accepting button presses until I physically removed it from the system and reseated it. I’ve repeatedly gotten a Windows message about how my “USB device might have limited functionality when connected to this port” even if I’m just plugging in the charger.

Oh really? I didn’t know that once since I only referenced the article. The article had issues with the modular top side, not the port. So I guess we were talking differently from the beginning.

Uhh, does the model 13 have a modular panel? IIRC, they don’t. Also, manufacturing modular panel and modular port are very different and the knowledge transfer cannot be that big. The port for example has a looser tolerance since they aren’t really that visible most of the time. So being snug but not flush is good enough. I can imagine the panel doesn’t have that luxury. Stability issue, that I can agree. But then again, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since they must handle additional assumptions that cannot be made on other laptops. Namely, modular GPU. Writing a firmware with that new assumption could be a PITA.

You do realize the 13 doesn’t have the back part for replaceable dedicated GPU right? That means the chassis itself must be redesigned since the hole will make the previous experience in the 13 different enough.

Easy or not depends vary wildly. But the usual task is

• partition the drive
• format the drive
• mount the drive
• install the base system

That is the bare minimum, but we need to do more configuration to be able to boot. Hence the next task is configuring the following

• fstab
• timezone, hostname, and networking
• boot loader (I just use the EFI directly nowadays)

That is it. Everything else is usually work specific. Like, if you wanted arch to be a server, you usually didn’t install a GUI. For workstation and gaming, you need more steps but it will vary depending on hardware. The archwiki covers a good deal of hardware from laptop to desktop and their quirks.

To be fair, he could also just be fed up after a long time being ignored for what he thinks is quite an important design decision.

For NAT, there is apparently a way to traverse NAT. I haven’t tried it tho, but the dude has a lot of research on the topic (NAT traversal), so if that didn’t work, maybe others will

Uhhh, no. I think it is better to implement something akin to federation than breaking up a company just because. If anyone wanted to sue valve, then they can enforce interoperability at the very least. But not dividing their business model. We don’t force apple to split their software and hardware did we? We force apple to have a choice of interoperability. From then, it is all fair since anyone can link their data from valve and any other store that opt to implement the interoperability protocol.

Why can’t anyone develop said features? Should the competitor worsen themselves just because no one is able to develop the same features? As far as I remember, valve doesn’t patent something ridiculous like regional pricing or family sharing, so anyone is welcome to develop it themselves. They even make proton open source but apparently Epic doesn’t like the idea of them on the linux market.

So let me get this straight. Any client that wanted to have steam features, like the forum, hosting, workshop, chat, and all the jazz, should be able to do so without paying steam any fee? Why didn’t they develop it themselves? Or should steam sell that as a service to those who wanted it? Say for example, epic wanted to have family sharing. Steam should sell their family sharing feature to epic as a service?

Emulation time it is!

Punch cards are gonna be back baby

Can’t have cache latency if there is no cache!

Another alternative is distrobox and bedrock linux.

You’re welcome. I also recommends Arch Wiki on SELinux. It helps clarify a lot of things and how different it is with traditional linux privilege escalation.

Right, working on every device requires a hardware solution. I haven’t encountered any such hardware yet but I do know that it is possible. Next, your second requirement makes what you’re trying to accomplish impossible. Privilege escalation by definition will escalate the privilege. The problem lies in the fact that the root user is basically a god in linux. You can even wipe your system if you so desire. However, you can read more into SELinux or other similar systems. It works by basically running check on the kernel level not user level. But the only solutions I can think of will make other day-to-day tasks more of a hassle. Also, note that whoever knows how to modify the SELinux can also bypass the system. I found an answer on serverfault that points to a blog. However, I haven’t read the blog yet. You may find an answer there.

By definition, you can’t. Any software level solution will fail since you can just move the drive somewhere else. It must be baked into the hardware and firmware.

Edit to add further clarification. Do you need it to be failing on every device or just on a device that you control? Since as stated before, moving a mass storage will completely overthrow any software solution

That “real time” on out of earth scale always boggles my mind. Technically it is as fast as it possibly could, knowing that radio waves travels at the speed of light. But damn, that light has to travel for a long time before arriving so “real time” data that arrives is technically “quite old” data.

Holy shit that is one heck of a thing to do.

TIL about bus factor