Most companies still change their laptops’ keyboard layouts in random negative ways every year; ship with stupid screen resolutions, woefully bad speakers, and disappointing touchpads; and stuff the most powerful processor and GPU in there and don’t focus enough on tuning the cooling, power usage, and fan profiles.

I don’t really get these nitpicks. If you’re planning to use the laptop as your daily driver, do what every other power user does and get a set of good peripherals.

That’s some pretty wild FUD right there.

I’ve got only one machine left running Windows 10 at home: a desktop PC I use exclusively for gaming. I increasingly look forward to purging Windows from it and installing Bazzite when the EOL date comes around.

If you have a Smart Bed^TM, Linux might even be in your bed.

Oracle Linux. It makes sense in many ways.

Sure you can! Just run alias flatpak=snap and you’ll be golden.

(I’ll show myself out…)

Yup. Modern MacOS is only pleasant to use if you have absolutely no preferences on how your computing environment should work and am willing to completely accept the walled garden.

Otherwise, it’s a hellscape.

Damn, that’s tough. Have you heard about our lord and savior Ubuntu and it’s blessed snap version of Firefox?

You could compile it from source yourself, and you won’t even have to worry about packaging and package managers.

Nice! I just bought an ARM laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, only to later learn that Ubuntu package support for RISCV is even more extensive than for ARM. I guess I’ll go with RISCV for my next machine.

Did you try to hack a Gibson from your home?

I lost my home to an accident. An rm -rf accident… :(

Whoa, that’s early KDE? They really went all in on looking like contemporary Windows.

I’ve used Linux since the mid 00’s and, well, I’ve seen some shit. But nowadays? It’s the best desktop OS I’ve used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE’s like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you’d likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.

TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!

I don’t use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I’d probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.