Excigma
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.
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
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
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.
I believe they’re available as backup but re-calibrate themselves with GPS coordinates if available. This is not a problem when GPS jamming is used but becomes an issue with spoofing - the pilots need to monitor for it.
I think they talk about it in this video by flightradar24 somewhere: https://youtu.be/4dG_Whxzdkk