Mr.Muffins

Of course.
Shop online. No crowd, just fast mouse clicks.
Always random.
You don't even have to leave the house when shopping online.
That online deals have become more and more involved and in existence.
From now until mid January, check all your favorite places as well as places you might not have discovered yet on a daily basis. This makes finding deals much greater. Always, always, always do your research on price history before buying. Not all sales are great.

Just in case any of y'all wanted it!
 

 
Uncompressed DL link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16zqexgJ59n8g0yQAgOc_RHFMqGYc484H/view

Lot's of places will have Black Friday deals all through the month of November (and even after). Sounds like you have an idea of what you want so know the fair market price and if it's a good deal you will know to pull the trigger on it. Also consider open box items, I have gotten smoking deals that would beat Black Friday prices/crowds/chaos!
Good Luck and Have Fun!

The zephyrus M is a good performance laptop with actual mobility. you can hit 5-6 hours of daily use with it unlike your typical gaming laptop which hits 3-4 ish. The reason for this is cause its a pure SSD build so it doesnt have to make room for a stupid hard drive so it gets a larger 76whr battery compared to the typical 54whr. so if you want firepower with actual mobility thats a good option (im a uni student so i bought a Zephyrus G, which is different in some specs but basicall has the same setup) . 
 
 
The Acer Triton 500 is similiar to the zephyrus M. Again, relativly thin, 84whr battery again mobile killing machine. The triton id say has a bit more in performance because it seems to have better thermals but not a whole lot different. Triton seems to edge out the Zephyrus a bit. 
 
 
 
 
The y540 is a simple standard reliable choice with good specs etc... not too familiar with the GS 65 stealth. 
 
 
If i were you, id go for either the Zephyrus or Triton depending on the pricing and specs. I like having a laptop that has good performance AND is actually god damn portable like, oh i dont know A LAPTOP.  Both a solid choices so again check out videos and reviews for both along with pricing in your region. 
 
what games will you be playing btw? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wait at the service desk/returns desk for Go Backs. Too often people will have too much stuff and not be able to pay for it all. There has not been a single year that one of every single Black Friday item ended up at Service Desk/Returns Desk.
 
Source: 2 years experience as a Walmart Employee + Several years of abusing this.

My advice is look in advance for the flyers of the stores you are interested in (Eg: Best Buy, Walmart, Target, etc, will have their flyers out at least a week in advance). Find out if there's anything of interest in the flyer. Find out if the item of interest is a regular sale, or a "door crasher" (door crashers are frequently limited qty, but in theory heavily discounted). Find out if the items are also one or two day only sales (Some "hot" items will only be on sale on the Friday or the Saturday, for example, instead of all week).
 
Then, just plan ahead. If you want a door crasher, you'll need to be there lined up as they open. If it's something you want with a particularly good discount, arrive early, don't wait.
 
The other strategy is to avoid retail stores completely. Use Amazon, Newegg, etc, instead - use Best Buy e-store instead of physical store, etc.
 
Either way - be smart. Don't buy something just because it's cheap. Buy it because:
1. You want/need it,
2. You feel like it's a good value.
 
Some people get too caught up in "finding deals" that they forget about value completely, and simply attribute something being on sale as "good value". Some things are good value at regular price. Some things are still bad value even while discounted. Use your brain and use common sense and you'll be alright.

I am she, and thanks for your kind words! I did freak out just making it this far : )

Doesn't matter if the screen is set to 4k or 1080p it will consume the same amount of electricity since all the same pixels are still turned on, all you're doing is causing interpolation.
 
Now if you render a game at 1080p opposed to 4k targeting V-Sync to reduce the GPU usage % then you might save some electricity there but if the workload is the same like just internet browsing then there won't be a difference.

If you want to learn about Linux and foss software "the hard way" look no further than linuxfromscratch.org

One thing you can do is get a free aws or google cloud account, then host it from there. Then you don't have to worry about doing it on your home pc and secuirty of your home network.

If he wants to say controversial stuff and he doesn't care if people believe him or not then use a VPN to create an online blog.   It's about the best he can do. 

Mhh honestly no but it depends, you can use Linux without the need of a terminal if you want, or you can learn how to use it by just following bash tutorials which can be done also on macos for example

If you're not afraid of doing some configuration yourself you might want to take a look at r/unixporn for inspiration.

Here's one of my submissions from a few months ago:
 

Everything there seems to be alright, League of Legends has worked for agessss on most distros anyway. Most drawing tablets are supported (yes Wacom, Huion) but the issue I see here is Affinity Designer/Photo. That does not have any Linux support whatsoever. Might have to switch to something else there I'm afraid. Davincii Resolve however is supported natively. 

Of course Linux is compatible with laptops, though it may have problems with specific models. The XPS line can come with Ubuntu preinstalled, so you can be fairly sure Linux will work fine on those. The same goes for the rest of your equipment; depending on the specific model and manufacturer support may be better or worse. You can search for "thing Linux" and you'll probably find a thread on some forum or on reddit where people discuss how well it works under Linux.
Define "minimalistic" - there are distros that upon first installation look like this:

 
and let you install whatever UI you prefer manually.
Yes, it will be an issue. You can get many windows programs to run with wine, but you can never be sure if bugs are due to the program itself or to wine - and some programs simply won't run.
It's hard to quantify and it partly depends on what distro you're using - generally it's safer because:
programs are installed directly from trusted repositories, so you don't need to download suspicious executables from the web (with some exceptions) viruses and malware are less common to begin with because the user base is smaller and precompiled binaries don't always work on every distribution Privacy is obviously much better - most distros don't "call home" at all and the ones that do only send anonimized diagnostics (which can be disabled).
 
For a new user just looking to try it out I'd recommend an ubuntu variant (namely Xubuntu, Kubuntu or Ubuntu MATE).

About Krita and Paint Tool Sai:
 
Krita has an installer for Linux.  Here the link on their site: https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/
Actually, I just looked on their site.  Nice, they are using appimage now.
 
On Paint Tool Sai, there seems to be several Youtube videos and guides on how to get that application running in Linux.  One link with a guide: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013903/can-you-run-paint-tool-sai-on-linux/1013915 
An individual there did a nice little visual step by step guide of how to get that application to work in WINE.
 
 
Look up Joe Collins on Youtube.  He got some nice videos on the Bash Shell of Linux.

Hi, Dell usually tends to have supported ACPI because of their XPS developer version which comes out with Ubuntu pre-installed, so you won't have any problems with the backlight, sleep, etc...

As for external drawing screen tablet, usually depends from the availability of the drivers, I got a simple Huion for playing osu, and it works. Wacom should have native support too, its something you can check with Google.

Davinci resolve has a native linux version and is easy to install, has a windows-like setup, but unlike windows, it doesn't support H264 video playback for some reason, so you will need to encode in HEVC or something else, I don't know the details

Any DX11 game is likely to run, except the one with EAC which are something currently unsupported with wine atm which are currently in development with Valve for a solution

As for customization, every linux distro lets you do that

Speaking of safety, viruses are less prone to attack you due to linux being less used in desktops and also because of the package manager, as for hacks/vulnerabilities, as long you update your system regularly, there are no issues compared with WIndows 10 automatic updates, as for privacy, some distros like ubuntu tend to send a minimal quantity of data compared to Windows.

Wine should be capable of running Windows programs, but has to be compatible. C# ones tend to be the most supported

As for the distro, you may choose the one you like, that should have all you need, but if you are unsure choose the most updated one just to be sure to have more drivers for your peripherals you want to run, like Ubuntu 19.04 or PopOS, or Manjaro Linux (Which has a slighly harder learning curve as it's based in arch and is a bit less stable)

You can try a desktop environment like KDE, since has widgets, so Kubuntu would be a choice, or Manjaro KDE, or PopOS with KDE. But GNOME offers customization like Windows too with something like DashToPanel
 

A simple way would be to use some zip ties, if you have some acrylic or aluminum you can always make an adapter. 

yea see this is one brand war i can get behind, i strongly detest apple and they are almost never the better option IMO or the cheapest for that matter lol

I think I get where you're coming from.  But realistically, imo at least, loyalty should come from 2 very similar performing and similar priced items.  Then you choose the one you prefer because of it.
 
The problem is when you have people spending £150-200 more on a processor that doesn't do much better 'because'.  I believe that's where the line becomes more in the stupid remit.

Yeah...  I fall very much into the anti-Apple group there lol.

how did you come up with the conclusion its the CPU fault is beyond me

Been playing Dota 1 and 2 for almost 20 years lolz. Dota 2 has complex gameplay with unique game mechanic.
 
Obviously, it's not possible to understand it fully just by playing 2 games. Even though the meta change time to time, you actually will understand most basic things in 2,3 months.
 
I suggest you take a look at https://www.dotabuff.com
It covers most of basic things you need ( current itemization, meta, builts, strength and weakness of each hero and their counters
 

Careful with the Gigabyte B450-I Aorus. Don't buy it until it gets a new rev.