Ah... this may be a Wayland issue.

>Alt-key, key works in Libreoffice, and any app with a menu.

Are you sure? I'm literally sitting in front of LO Writer and it doesn't work. LO 25.x on Debian 13.

As someone who uses LibreOffice regularly I'm not sure I agree entirely: The ribbon makes discoverability and use of (default) keyboard shortcuts much easier, and I find myself having to dig deep in documentation to find a lot of shortcuts on LibreOffice. The sequential ALT, key, key, key shortcut system the ribbon allows is quite useful and something I miss on LO.

If I were purely a mouse user I might be inclined to agree with you...

Google has had this for a decade or so as well. The new part is that they're using Gemini for it now... so 10% more hallucinated free time slots...

>ARM is probably the future. But I won't tough another ARM tablet unless it has UEFI or u-boot. And the chip vendor's support absolutely has to be upstream before considering it. Else you will be stuck on some old distro and it will be a real struggle to upgrade.

Agree 100%. There's a disturbing lack of realization of this fact in the official forum for this tablet... people are focused on requesting luxury features such as built in cellular instead of making sure the base is solid.

Maybe we'll get some decent dumb displays out of it - that would be a welcome change. All I really want in a TV is a performant display with some decent HDMI (and if possible Displayport) connectivity.

Tweaks is installed by default even on the very conservative Debian.

You can probably also use gsettings or dconf editor - it's not hidden, just not exposed to end users... as someone who recommends Gnome based distros to friends and family, I'm pretty happy with the fact that my 86 year old father won't accidentally activate focus-follows-mouse and then call me to tell me his mouse is broken and/or cursed.

Of course it gives you that option. Just activate it in Gnome Tweaks. You have the choice between:

Click to Focus
Focus on Hover
Focus Follows Mouse

It's because every time IC outside of the tech realm tries to branch out past Excel they end up with another external consultant to feed... after a while it just becomes easier to bodge everything in Excel than listen to yet another 15 marketing pitches and then onboard a new consultant they didn't really want in the first place.

If you're lucky to be at least somewhat technically minded you can learn to use Python, sqlite databases and other stuff you can run completely locally without a lot of external IT support. Everything else is just too much overhead for someone who's main job isn't all too tech related...

It's not as easy as you make it sound, unfortunately. Sure, the hardware is capable, but the usage patterns are so new that UX expectations will be all over the place.

On the one hand, I'd want a full desktop experience (Vanilla Debian with Gnome, preferably) when docked... on the other hand, I'd want full continuity and access to the apps I just had open in phone mode, in addition to full desktop versions of those apps when applicable. The browser is one case where the degree of integration will likely be tricky, if only because every user has a different expectation.

Alternatively I guess I could live with what amounts to a full VM container for the desktop side, fully decoupled from the phone side, but I highly doubt the general user base would go for that.

The current build of Android 16 on my Pixel 8 Pro has a desktop mode with windowing support, but it's very much just Android apps in a clunky basic window manager - Firefox is basically unusable (zoom settings, mobile sites by default etc.). It does work well as an RDP client at least, which is what I've been using it for.

>It won't take long, but really ...is anyone really that desperate to use Windows ?

I'm kinda desperate to keep my 85 year old father on Windows 10 rather than moving him over to Windows 11 or Linux.

I've already set up a new laptop with Debian Trixie for him that looks 99% like his Windows 10 setup, and I'll bring that to him later this year when I next visit, but I see about a 50% chance that he won't like it or feel overwhelmed by the remaining differences and will want to go back to Windows 10. And I expect Windows 11 would be even worse in terms of UI changes etc.

Why buy an X1C then? If you want ports, buy a P16 and be done with it. Don't buy the device where one of the main feature is thinness (which comes with an inherent lack of ports) and then complain about the lack of ports... and it's not like there aren't other compromises between those two extremes.

If you need to plug that many peripherals into your laptop, you purchased the wrong laptop. I get wanting a full sized keyboard and mouse at your desk, but that issue has long been solved with docking stations.

I would not purchase a laptop I'm not comfortable typing/mousing on, especially away from my desk...

There are a bunch of different models unfortunately. Some are crap for certain purposes - if your work issued you a workstation when you'd rather have a thin'n'light, or they gave you one of the cheapo models (which unfortunately do also exist - another thing that Apple does better), then you either got one of the crap ones or something that doesn't suit your preferences. Heavy, SLOW and loud points to cheapo rather than workstation...

That said, if you want a decent keyboard layout, there's no real alternative to a T/X/P series these days - proper arrow keys with PgDnPgUp, physical home/end keys, a right-ctrl key... The newer models have standard Fn placement btw.

It's hilarious how bad the actual products are for the amount of money they're spending on "talent".

But these problems generally aren't solved just "on the ground" - you need a chain of solid people all the way from the person implementing the change/feature/fix up to the person making the decisoin to implement, including all the support personnel. Dev/Eng., PMs, testers, dept. head, etc. - everyone involved needs to be competent and at least somewhat see the big picutre - that's when we get a cohesive end product that works well.