I’ve used an Acer Spin 5 and Dell Latitude 7440 with Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora and NixOS over the years without many issues.

I’ve heard that the x360 laptop you have may be a little troublesome but you can always test things out on a live Linux USB.

• I’ve heard that the sound quality might be degraded on Linux, or certain speakers don’t work
• The flip switch doesn’t work, meaning that the keyboard and trackpad aren’t disabled when flipped.

Ofc, there are a few x360 laptops so it might not apply, I’d encourage you to just give it a go with a live USB.

For using your stylus for note taking, I’d recommend trying Xournal++ and/or Rnote

Seconded. You can try usb redirection in libvirt, and if that doesn’t work, you can try passing through the usb root hub as a pcie device

Webcam on Intel may not work due to drivers that Intel hasn’t written/upstreamed for IPU6 cameras. Looks like it’s in the work now… for certain sensors. Intel has taken literal years to get anything out. the Core Ultra 200 series is out but drivers for these webcams which have in use since Tiger lake (almost half a decade ago!!) still don’t work.

“Greg KH Recommends Avoiding Alder Lake Laptops” https://www.phoronix.com/news/Greg-KH-No-ADL-Webcam-Laptop

Nor the integrated cameras or the IR camera worked out of the box on my laptop. Some hacks could be done to make it work but it breaks after the system is updated. It never worked when I needed it and image quality was limited to 720p and worse. From what I understand, current methods to get the camera to work use minimal software processing to process the images, instead of the dedicated silicon.

Not all Intel laptops use IPU6. I know some HPs do not.

Haven’t had many issues with the Intel AX211. Very rarely, the wifi settings will disappear after my laptop suspends and a reboot is needed.

The battery capacity also doesn’t seem very big, I’m not sure how efficient the AMD CPU is but I’d be worried that Intel would deliver less battery life.

GPU performance might also be better on AMD? (haven’t checked).

It appears that some other brands like Xiaomi use higher amperage for their fast charging instead of higher voltage to deliver more power in addition to potentially more proprietary communication through the data lines. PPD likely has a lower current limit at the voltage a VOOC phone charges at too (apparently around 10A?). Mainstream 100W wires (20V 5A) might probably be “incompatible” even if the power supply were rated for higher amperage.

I do totally agree with you and hope for PD fast charging to be adopted, or for the PD standard to be made more flexible so that manufacturers can have what they want (but then again we will have the issue of USB-C where one connector does all but not all wires are made equal…).

Things just working as you expect them to is always very nice. If I buy a high wattage brick, I expect it to fast charge my phone.

My phone unfortunately doesn’t seem to support PD/PPS, but supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge… meaning that it’ll charge in 2-3 hours from my laptop or a 25W/45W/65W PD/PPS brick… only at either 5W or 10W… but it’ll charge in an hour with a Qualcomm QC compatible brick or 30 minutes with the original 100W brick… :')

Also as an aside, the Find X8 seems to be using a silicon carbon battery - I thought that silicon electrodes expanded and contracted much more than previous generation batteries causing long term health to be worse…

It will be interesting to see if the battery health on these models really does stand the test of time. With the more efficient chip drawing less power, we can hope :)

With some apps (unsure if any open source ones exist), Android can become a Bluetooth Keyboard for a connected computer too! The keyboard isn’t very useful, but having a portable trackpad for a laptop during presentations may be helpful

Older Microsoft Surfaces have quite terrible battery life, especially on Linux, have terrible thermals and aren’t very repairable. I’m in the middle of repairing a Surface Pro 7 and the wifi antenna is sandwiched between the frame and the screen, so taking the screen off is a death wish for the wifi antenna (even ifixit ripped it in their repair). The battery is also permanently glued onto the frame, saying that it should not be removed or replaced. The Surface, with an Intel CPU, absolutely fries itself trying to update Windows as well. The heatsink inside seems to use the screen and battery as a thermal mass? I believe modern Surfaces are better in both repairability and battery life.

iPads have pretty decently efficient CPUs and have decent performance - probably doesn’t get as hot as a Surface…

Samsung tablets seem ok too and definitely undercut the two when new

I would recommend getting something older (e.g. Tab S7, S8, S9, S7 FE, S9 FE, or iPads or Surfaces second hand if you don’t have much money - they may come with a keyboard cover which will cost you an arm or a leg when new.

You may also consider flip laptops if you don’t demand too much from your laptop. Compared to iPads and Samsung Tablets, you can use Windows or Linux or whatever. Depending on what you study, that may be important. Flip laptops typically have not great thermal performance so don’t expect amazing normal laptop like performance, but I’ve previously had an Acer Spin 5 and now I’m using a Dell Latitude 7440 2-in-1 and they’ve both been great for light workloads. They’re bulky compared to tablets and I’d only use them on tables, which isn’t a problem for me. I lose out on the higher wattage CPUs used in non 2-in-1 laptops though. Some people describe 2-in-1s as a jack of all trades, master of none, as they’re not great laptops and not great tablets. I’ve personally really enjoyed having everything on one device - online exams could be done in Xournal++, exported to PDF and just uploaded all on one device.

I don’t think I have enough knowledge to solve this or say anything for certain, but I wonder if the power button is treated as an external keyboard and is getting ignored in tablet mode?

Regarding your mouse double clicking, some Reddit users suggest pressing the click button quite hard a few times…

Not recommending against RustDesk - it is a very cool project - but regarding the “Why?”, you could use a VPN or something like Tailscale which has MagicDNS that’ll resolve hostnames of computers to their local IP address. You can use this with GNOME’s RDP server to remote in from another device pretty easily.

PairDrop(dot)net is a fork with a bit more features

Strange. The default keyboard works wonders for me but doesn’t automatically pop up. Are you able to swipe from the bottom edge of the display to make it pop up?

Right? Even MacBook Pros have larger batteries in the 14 inch and 16 inch lineup.

Just use Waydroid instead: https://waydro.id, much lower overhead, however you need to mess with ARM emulation. For installing Google Apps and Device not Play certified: https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script

More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid

Dell laptops have mostly just worked on Linux quite well, but you may run into issues with the camera, however this hack(?) has worked for me: https://github.com/stefanpartheym/archlinux-ipu6-webcam.

I believe Dell has a catch for the camera saying that it may use more CPU when in use. Whilst the laptop is Ubuntu Certified, the camera only works if you select the Ubuntu option instead of Windows, and use the install they give you.

Some other nice things to have:

• fwupd should also work for firmware updates, hopefully. My speakers sounded worse on Linux than Windows, some tinkering with hdataskretask helped a little, however it’s still worse.
• This should let you change some bios settings, like changing charge limits and thermal profile (cool, performance, balanced etc): https://github.com/dell/libsmbios
• This GNOME shell extension allows you to change charge limits easily: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5724/battery-health-charging/

We have a Panasonic inverting one that has a flat bed (no turn table) and it doesn’t heat evenly…