If looking for a Linux or Windows laptop, this is the right answer. Look for one of these used, and get the highest spec model in your budget. I’ve still got ThinkPads from 2012 kicking around running Linux that are perfectly capable light duty machines, not that I’d go that old if it was my primary laptop.

ah definitely. I haven’t tried it out yet but I think they improved that in plasma 6.1. although that’s absolutely the point you were making: lots of things that used to work fine on X11 that Wayland just doesn’t have yet.

yeah with the exception of krita (which runs fine on xwayland, even with a tablet) I’ve been able to run 100% Wayland, with sway for work and KDE for home, but my needs aren’t too wild. I’m sure a lot of users feel like the rug was unnecessarily pulled out from under them; change that feels like a regression even for very good reason will almost never feel like reason enough if it’s your shit that gets worse, definitely.

still, I think you’ve got to get people using the thing if you want the thing to get better. probably more casual users didn’t even notice when gnome moved over, for example. but probably even the most casual user ran into some problem, and that’s a bummer.

out of curiosity what use cases/software has stopped you from running Wayland? I do miss the magic of tunneling an X session over SSH, that felt like dang magic in the early 2000s.

I mean that’s a fair question, because I feel like mostly the advantages are, hm, not “theoretical” because it’s an actual advantage, but not something you’ll really encounter day-to-day. better security for example. but generally who cares because if I interact with something malicious I’m probably owned anyway.

originally I was interested in it because of fractional scaling, but I think that works in X11 for the most part now?

at this point it’s mostly about using the bleeding edge stuff so I can help find problems. I do find that when it works it works very well, and the experience of using a Wayland desktop is less wonky: fewer weird rendering glitches when dealing with multiple monitors, connecting and disconnecting my laptop from a dock, etc. I find this works better with Wayland, but I wouldn’t say “so much better that you must move to it today” if you’re happy with what you have.

similarly full-system stability has been better, and I have fewer crashes that take down everything, I feel. it’s perhaps subjective though: I’ve been running it for so many years maybe all I’m experiencing is that the software I run has become better in general.

so: I don’t think it’s a night-and-day life-changing experience or anything, but it does feel modern and stable, and it’s definitely where things are heading so why not get used to it now, and help to improve it, is my thinking.

I’ll check that out, thanks for the recommendation. as for it defaulting to X11, it’s no issue because the Wayland session is also available and has been absolutely solid for me, I was just surprised that it wasn’t the preferred session by the distro.

I can’t speak to MicroOS but I have been running Tumbleweed for about a month. normally I run arch.l, but wanted to try something new for a change, and I was interested in trying out a full DE as I typically run sway.

I’ve been extremely impressed with KDE; I assume you feel the same if you’re looking at Kinoite, but feels worth saying out loud for other readers.

Tumbleweed, for an Arch user, is fine. it installed fine, was reasonably sane out of the box (although defaults to X11, not Wayland) and it’s been perfectly stable for the month I’ve run it. Doing development on it is very easy, and it comes with a non-root docker setup script out of the box which is nice, and I’ve had no issue building software on it. YaST is powerful but has an awful UI.

However: it has the same problem as Ubuntu for me, which is that if you want software from outside the repos you have to trust other repositories and trust their keys, and they often want to replace packages, and finding out if they are built safely can be quite challenging. compare this to Arch, where you can easily read a PKGBUILD and they almost always download sources direct from the developer/vendor, and they very rarely replace other packages. So I find it hard to trust this system’s integrity over time; where are my packages coming from? So in the end I’ll probably go back to Arch, or maybe try out Endeavour, but if this doesn’t concern you then I think Tumbleweed is a capable distro that’s easy to get up and running.

they make bad products that are media darlings because it’s fashion more than anything. they’re treated like consumer advocates but they are one of the absolute worst companies for vendor lock-in, and are absolutely anti-consumer, but will have innumerable articles written about how they’re “the best” for any given measure. it drives me nuts how the public perception of them is the complete opposite of what they actually are, and i don’t get it.

also their software is bad. all due credit their hardware impressed but it doesn’t matter if the software is crap.

and they aren’t private: they’ve got all your data but have somehow convinced everyone that it’s fine that they have it because they’re somehow better than every other large tech company.

yep. I use backblaze B2 with rclone, and just don’t worry since it’s encrypted (including the file names) before it leaves my server.

jq, or if I need to do something wacky a one-off python script.

The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.

I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.

On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.

I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.

I have left arch installs un-updated for months and had them be fine. I did leave one for a year once and the update hosed it, but it was still recoverable and runs fine to this day.

so, I wouldn’t worry much about the “update every week” thing. even on my daily driver I forget for a month sometimes.

I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.

it’s easy to recommend a ThinkPad for Linux, and something in the T or P series laptops might suit you. video editing is a potential difficulty though, as that feels a little more workstation-grade than the rest, and you’ll probably want to go big on RAM (32GB would be best) and be sure to get at least an intel i7. I’ve not had great luck with battery life on AMD (shame because everything else is great) but perhaps others have tips for doing better.

you could also go for the ThinkPad yoga models (make sure they’re still ThinkPad though! they also sell a different model line just called “yoga”) if you wanted a tablet/convertible for graphics work.

anyway look at the T14, P14s, or P16 if you want something bigger. whatever the latest generation of those models is.

I’ve used rclone with backblaze B2 very successfully. rclone is easy to configure and can encrypt everything locally before uploading, and B2 is dirt cheap and has retention policies so I can easily manage (per storage pool) how long deleted/changed files should be retained. works well.

also once you get something set up. make sure to test run a restore! a backup solution is only good if you make sure it works :)

that’s fair.

I’ve worked with marketers for years. many of them have a blind spot for what they create: they can realize something is irritating, or invasive, but not when it’s their marketing, which is obviously superior and what people want to see. it’s some sort of artist+marketer brainrot.

sorry to generalize, I’ve just seen it a lot over the years.

I imagine this is something like it: we’ll reach them with the perfect message, it’ll be exactly what they want! won’t that be delightful?

…completely ignoring how horrifying it is.

this was such a weird claim, and I never really understood how it could be true specifically for phones, where they aren’t in control of system software. there’s like a gradient of possibility here:

• Android phones from major manufacturers, and Apple phones: doubt it. those things are too heavily scrutinized, someone would’ve found it, and the companies that make them don’t have the impetus.
• official “smart” voice devices from Amazon, Google, et al: doubt it, same reasoning as above
• Android phones from small players, heavily subsidized models, etc.: sure, could be
• smart TVs from major manufacturers: probably not? medium “maybe”? I bought one of these with a hardware mic switch so I guess that shows my paranoia
• other smart TVs: I dunno, feels highly likely

so: I’m careful about what I use so my risk felt pretty low, but I also feel like if this were true security researchers would’ve discovered it. let alone the fact that what they describe is bandwidth and battery intensive (off-device or on-device respectively, I don’t remember what they claimed as I read the 404 media report some weeks back) but it still makes me wonder: what led them to make these claims then? fascinating, pretty scary.

I would like this feature as well. I’m finding it very difficult to navigate to other instances communities as there’s no way I can find to browse to them, nor search for them. the only way I can seem to locate them is by accidentally coming across a community in my feed.

agree with all these points. another thing I think about a lot is: I have the benefit of having grown up with the Internet but before social media, and so all of my embarrassing teen content is long gone. can’t imagine having that follow you around for the rest of forever, tied to your real name, looked at by potential employers and being asked to defend it for the rest of your life.

I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.