Kabe

Mine’s the 2020 AMD model, does everything I need it to do and it’s still going strong. Build quality is great and I love the high quality 2160 x 1440 display. Overall, it’s been a far better experience that the Dell XPS I had previously, which started giving me issues after just a couple of years.

I bought it when I was living in Asia, though. Now I’m in the US, I honestly don’t know what replacement I’d pick up if it died tomorrow.

I’ve been running various distros off my Huawei Matebook 14 in the US for years with zero issues. They make really good laptops, TBH.

IMO, the first statement is half-stupid, the second one is half-overcomplicated :)

Welcome to English, my friend. No one ever claimed that it wasn’t a pain in the arse to learn :)

Lol well teaching this professionally surely makes me some form of authority (albeit of course not the authority!) on this subject.

To clarify, your original point sounded like you were making a distinction between metaphorical mirrors and actual mirrors:

“in the mirror” tends to more often refer to a metaphorical “mirror”, typically when discussing self-reflection

• “I took a look in the mirror and decided to change my ways.”

“in a mirror” tends to refer most often to actual mirrors that exist in reality, not metaphorically

• “I looked into a mirror to fix my eyeliner.”

This incorrect distinction is what I was objecting to, because of course we can use both the indefinite and definite articles to refer to either literal or figurative mirrors.

Nope, as I explained in my other comment, it’s standard usage.

In English, we often use the definite article when speaking in general about a specific activity or action that involves a non-specific object. E.g. “go to the bathroom” or “catch the bus”, or “read the newspaper”. It’s not poor form at all.

A fair guess, but this isn’t one of those times when a grammatical error becomes normalized through common usage.

There is no grammar rule that separates speaking literally versus metaphorically in this case.

“You have something on your face; go take a look in the mirror” is just as grammatically correct in English as “You need to take a good look in the mirror and change your ways.”

I’ve explained why this is standard usage in English in my comment here.

English teacher here. Articles in English can be really confusing but essentially we use the definite article in this situation because:

• Uniqueness: In most situations, there’s only one mirror in a room or a home that’s readily available for someone to look into.
• Generality: Similar to “going to the bathroom,” “look in the mirror” refers to the general act of using a mirror to see oneself, not interacting with any specific mirror.

Apart from selecting the folder view and making it really small, I don’t think so. Maybe look into hacking it using gconfeditor, or something?

BTW - your image link is broken.