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

I think it handles congestion better and saves energy for the cell tower. It’s a good choice for crowded city centres, near university campuses and train stations where many people frequent

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).

I’ve had an Acer Spin 5 and Dell Latitude 7440 2-in-1, and with regards to autorotation and keyboard disabling, it has just worked out of the box for me on every distro I’ve used (apart from Arch which needed an extra package for rotation). The keyboard disabling also works in BIOS on both laptops, so perhaps it is done at a firmware level for these laptops. Some of my friends have trouble with the keyboard on their HP 2-in-1s.

Summoning the OSK is okay on GNOME, you just need to swipe up from the bottom of the screen, but the experience with the keyboard automatically popping up is worse on Wayland :(. Generally my experience has been the opposite of yours though, it has been quite good!

Hopefully the framework will drive more attention to this area though, the OSK is a particular pain point I think, Windows 10/11 does a great job here.

the processor it uses, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, is pretty notorious for poor efficiency. I have a phone with it and it heats up a lot (battery reports 45C) from more demanding tasks (such as gps), battery life isn’t the best either.

That said, my battery life has not been as bad as yours… 2:30hrs seems quite poor.

doesn’t bother them if they’re a property investment company

As a Dell user, not very happy with mine. Uneven backlight/bleeding, poor build quality (screen glass misaligned with the bezels, keyboard keys coming out which aren’t covered under warranty according to Dell, parts of the keyboard failing, trackpad click failing - the trackpad is integrated into the chassis so that had to be replaced) and it’s quite overpriced.

That said, some models are Ubuntu certified and get firmware updates without Windows Update

It may be possible to get past that, I’ve seen people disassembling the battery to get the BMC and connecting the DC power supply to that instead.

It sounds way more risky than OP’s initial idea. I wouldn’t recommend taking apart batteries.

I think they are wondering if one extension can use both v2 and v3 APIs at once? As in whether v3 APIs will be “backported” to allow v2 extensions to use them

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?

I’m using an app to use my Android phone as a webcam, which works great (good low light performance!) provided I can stand it up somewhere above my laptop screen (finicky). You can accidentally knock it over. Might be worth considering if you don’t use the camera much - otherwise an external one will probably attach better and he more stable

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.