Contramuffin

The Thing (1982) has basically consistently been my favorite horror movie

I mainly do work indoors, so the brightness does not really matter that much to me. But as far as I can tell, the brightness is pretty normal for laptops - I don't think it's any brighter or dimmer than other laptops I've used in the past. According to this website that I found, brightness is 25 to 486 nits. Google search seems to say that average maximum brightness for laptops is somewhere around 300-400 nits.

My understanding is that the screen is generally what eats up most of the battery on device, so if you plan to have brightness turned up, it might be difficult to find a laptop with a long battery life.

The cpu is on the mainboard and can't be removed, but you can replace the entire mainboard. Basically, you can upgrade, but you'll have to upgrade a couple other things along with it

Just tested with normal power profile and screen brightness turned down - battery went down by about 50% after 3 hours. I think my laptop usually dies after 3 hours because I have the screen brightness up

Yes, but that's my point, you see. Because Arm historically has been used for mobile and small devices, there's been a strong incentive for decades to emphasize power efficiency. Because x86 historically has been used for desktops, there's been a strong incentive to emphasize power. It's only been very recently that Arm attempted to have comparable power, and even more recently that x86 attempted to have comparable power efficiency.

Sure, Arm is currently more efficient, but the general consensus is that there's no inherent reason for why Arm must be more efficient than x86. In other words, the only reason it is more efficient is just because they've been focusing on efficiency for longer.

Both AMD and Intel's current gen x86 cpu's are, from what I can tell, basically spitting distance away from Qualcomm's Arm cpu's in terms of battery life, and rumor has it that both x86 companies should be able to match Arm chips in efficiency by next gen.

So if efficiency is a priority for you, I think it's worthwhile to wait and see what the cpu companies cook up in the next couple of years, especially as both AMD and Intel seem to be heavily focused on maximizing efficiency right now

My understanding is that Arm chips don't have any fundamental advantage over x86 chips. They're more efficient simply because they've been optimized to be more efficient for so long. I've heard that upcoming Intel and AMD chips could be able to compete with the new Arm cpu's, so if you're not going to get a new laptop soon, it seems worthwhile to just wait and see

Yes, I don't use the external GPU. I just use the AMD APU. Also I realized that AMD 7000 could refer to both the cpu and the GPU. Ah, AMD and their marketing

Kubuntu on Framework 16 AMD 7000 series here. Sleep is horrible - definitely drains your battery. Bag heats up, and I estimate maybe a 1% drain per hour. I've enabled hibernate though I rarely use it.

Battery is alright but not great. I get maybe 2-3 hours of active, light use from full battery.

No compatibility issues that I've noticed, though, of course, Linux has its fair share of minor non-hardware-related bugs.

Camera is serviceable but not amazing. Not sure about microphone but I assume the same thing. Speakers are somewhat odd in that the speakers are pointed to the side rather than toward the front, but again - serviceable.

I think having higher frame rates isn't necessarily about whether our eyes can perceive the frame or not. As another commenter pointed out there's latency benefits, but also, the frame rate affects how things smear and ghost as you move them around quickly. I don't just mean in gaming. Actually, it's more obvious when you're just reading an article or writing something in Word. If you scroll quickly, the words blur and jitter more at low frame rates, and this is absolutely something you can notice. You might not be able to tell the frametime, but you can notice that a word is here one moment and next thing you know, it teleported 1 cm off

"is" is correct here, due to the implied nouns. "Data" in this case is an appositive and serves to describe the implied noun, "word." And "plural" is an implied noun for "plural word"

You can see it most clearly if you fill in the implied nouns:

(the word) data is a plural (word)

It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, "CPU is the brain of the computer"). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

I'm always surprised when I hear that other people don't have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don't even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill

Technology needs to be actively taught and actively learned! If their school isn't teaching it, maybe try subscribing to some online tech literacy courses?