I’ve been waiting for a ryzen framework laptop since spring 2021. I’m in batch 1 and can’t wait to get my hands on it. I’m sure they will have these BIOS/firmware issues sorted out by launch, and I’ve been waiting this long so a couple more weeks isn’t that big of a deal.
I’ll trust the nuclear scientists that say that the release is safe, but there should be a transparent international panel, including China which has concerns about the release into fishing waters, that is given access to conduct their own tests with all parties agreeing to release their findings.
Depending on the block size the filesystem may not be able to use that 4.01Mb of unallocated space. There’s always wasted space with any file system because they have to make a trade off between making use of the available space and fast access.
I don’t think you can extend a partition at the beginning, only the end of the partition. This is because the partition header and table is written at the beginning of the partition (i.e. the file system needs to know where to start reading so that it can traverse files and directories in the partition). To support resizing a partition at the beginning data would have to be moved to the new beginning of the partition, and exactly which data needs to be copied differs from file system to file system so it’s not something supported by a partition manager such as KDE partition manager. Therefore, the only way to do what you want is to backup the partition, delete it, and create a new partition at the beginning of the drive and the restore the contents of the partition.
Extending a partition at the end is much simpler, basically some header just gets updated and says this is the new end of the partition, and then a file system specific command lets the files system know that you now have all of this free space available for use.
Once x86 macOS became stable around snow leopard I switched from Linux to macOS full time on my mobile machines. For years home brew was a shining light to get a decent tool chain installed to be able to do development. But somewhere around the time they changed to naming macOS releases after places in California, both home brew and macOS started changing in ways that made it harder to maintain a stable development environment. Why and when did it start deciding to upgrade every package I have installed when I try to install a new package? It regularly broke both mine and our developers’ machines and I finally had enough of both. Stay away from home brew if you want your working development environment to continue working 6 months later. It WILL break when you need it most and cost you hours if not days of work to fix. I’ve never ran home brew on Linux but it’s honestly not anything I would ever consider even when it worked well.