Why one needs a dVD drive in his laptop after all, haha.

It was this place:

There were two or three guys on hand every time I went in there. Definitely old-school computer nerds, although I was surprised that they didn't have anybody who was comfortable installing Linux. No matter; I was.

Is the new drive a standard part that's easy to get? If not, it's still harder to change the DVD drive in a laptop.

On my Lenovos it's just a matter of pushing a button ... that bay is where the 500 Gb hdd resides in my laptop .

Good to know about this. That's what I'll look for, Business class "desktop replacement". I'll try to remember that.

I'm impressed. I've been trying to get Linux (Mint is what I use normally) on our Dell laptop and failing. After hours of googling I see many people having the same problem.

DELL usually has very good linux support, in my experience. Ubuntu loads seemlessly.

I can order and get the proper drive for just about any laptop next day. A lot of desktops are now also using the low profile laptop style drives so they are not as "universal" as they once were. ANd by the way, I worked for what was at the time the largest wholesale distributor of CD ROM drives in Canada - and the first major didtributor of Hitachi drives in Canada. I put CD ROM "libraries" - towers with up to 16 drives - into libraries, universities,and hospitals from coast to coast - on UNIX, Novel, and Banyan Vines networks as well as DOS and Windows apps before CD was supported by any of them natively. That was 5 years of my life.

Unless they've changed in the last 3 years DELL and SUPPORT are never found on the same page - - - But I know what you are saying - their products are COMPATIBLE with Linux. So are just about every other manufacturer's PC products. Might be more accurate to say Linux supports DELL and most other hardware.

I installed Fedora. That's what we used on Dells at my workplace. Piece of cake.

Dell offers systems pre-loaded with linux. No other major PC manufacture does that. That's what I call very good linux support (which means they upstream all the appropriate drivers).

I've a mix, Ubuntu on my Dell laptop (since fedora wasn't, at the time, very laptop friendly). Fedora on my home desktop (an HP) and Scientific Linux 6 (clone of RHEL6) on my work Dell workstation; our cluster systems are running CentOS.

All were a piece of cake to install.

I've got an older Dell Inspiron that I'm going to bump to 16GB and put a SSD in. I got pissed at RedHat about twenty years ago when they broke gcc and Python but I thought I'd give Fedora a try since the rest of my machines have Debian or Debian derivatives.

I was impressed by the app on the Fedora site that allows you to select an iso and creates a bootable USB drive. They say it works better than rufus. I like KDE but OpenSUSE is too woke for me so I'll try the KDE 'spin'.

Besides, Torvalds uses Fedora so how can it go wrong? He says Debian is too hard to install but admits he hasn't tried it lately.

I have a thin Lenovo. The drive is a M.2, which requires removing the back cover (several screws). I was surprised to find the manual actually tells you how to do that.

While I like to do my own installation, its good to know all the hardware has been tested with Linux.

What's "woke" about an OS?

What is "woke" but a GOP nonsense word?

So does Lenovo - and HP has also in the past - not sure at present as I am no longer an HP authorized reseller.

I really do NOT like bottom power supplies. Heat rizes. Power supplies produce heat. Suck cool air into the bottom of the case and exhaust it through the power supply at the top or help it along with a top evacuation fan bypassing the power supply.

"anyone who is conservative or right of center is rotten flesh that needs to be cut out."

The Os isn't woke but the leadership is. There is no reason for them to bring politics to a distro project but they did. There was no reason for Mozilla to bring politics to a project and force out Brendan Eich but they did.