From my understanding, /e/ is indeed less secure than AOSP due to patches being slower. Being somewhat de-Googled might make it more private, but that isn’t the same thing as more secure.

I think the main thing here is that Graphene thinks it’s irresponsible when people describe other ROMs as “secure” or “hardened” when they realistically aren’t, especially when they’re running on hardware that doesn’t really support high levels of security from 3rd party ROMs (this is a large part of why GrapheneOS only supports Pixels). Many phones don’t support locking the bootloader with 3rd party OS, and many don’t even have a secure element. Many also don’t have great track records with keeping kernels and firmware up to date. In all of these cases, you can’t really make strong guarantees about the security of the device with any 3rd party OS, including /e/.

I’m glad to hear yours have been holding up! Maybe my friends and I were just particularly unlucky.

The service manuals are available direct from Dell. For all the laptop’s faults in my experience, I do appreciate that the SSDs are socketed, as are the RAM sticks on the 15. I do also appreciate that Dell sells replacement batteries (and they aren’t glued in either!) as that’s usually the first part to need a swap.

I haven’t used the XPS 13 personally but my experience and all my friends’ experience with the XPS lineup is that despite their build quality, they’re quite prone to failure. On my 15, the keyboard failed multiple times, as well as one of the fans and eventually one thunderbolt port, all within a span of 4 years.

They’re beautiful machines that really should be quality, but in practice for some reason they haven’t lasted for me. On the plus side though, Dell does at least offer service manuals, and lots of parts can be replaced by a user (on the 15 you can easily replace fans, RAM, SSDs, and with some work you can replace the top deck, display, and SD reader).

I don’t know the architecture of AI accelerator in Ryzen processors but I do know a fair amount of image deblurring and denoising tools run on the neural engine on Apple Silicon. The neural engine is good enough for a lot of tasks, provided that your model only uses relatively simple operators and doesn’t need full precision.

Yeah there’s a good chance you’re right. Maybe something to do with memory management as well.

Long term I’ll probably end up switching back to Darktable. I used it before and honestly it is quite good, but I currently have a free license for CC from my university and the AI denoise features in LR are pretty nice compared to the classical profiled denoise from Darktable. It does also help that the drivers for my SD card reader are less finicky on Windows so it’s easier for me to quickly copy over images from my camera on there instead of Linux. Hopefully that also gets better over time!

I don’t know exactly, but it’s apparently a thing. Some game anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat will give you an error message saying something along the lines of “Virtual machines are not supported.” Some are easy to bypass by just tweaking your VM config, others not so much.

Fair enough! I think it’s more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn’t properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.

For me it’s also because I’m on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops’ dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I’d prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.

I’m a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It’s easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.

The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn’t play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn’t support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.