Most 10xx work perfectly fine, and were also still being sold till recently.

I’ve had mixed experiences myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it randomly breaks. I just wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants it to “just work” and be stable and not do maintenance. For me, I’m someone who’s happy to do maintenance, but I don’t want that to extend to my graphics card, which in this day and age ought to just work.

nvidia cards are always giving people grief, especially on Wayland. Technically supported but practically not recommended if you want an easy time

I think those three will be completely fine, but also I think base Arch would be completely fine for you. I have no idea why it’s a meme that Arch is so “hard”. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone coming from Windows or Mac who has no idea what they’re doing and had no poweruser tendencies on Windows/Mac either. But for someone who’s used Linux for a few years, I think doing a base Arch install is no biggie at all. It’s got a very annoying meme reputation but I think it’s completely inaccurate.

That’s an aside, and I’m not saying you should use base Arch, just that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if that’s something you’re interested in. Although if you’re coming from a “beginner” distro and your intent is to learn, I do think doing a base Arch install (even if you don’t stick with it) is a good idea. You’ll be entirely capable of the install process and probably get a better understanding of how your system works. Then after you install it you can switch to some other distro you prefer.

Oh amazing. Seems like it’s still in early development and only supports Stardew and Cyberpunk but I look forward to it being more mature and supporting more games.

I’ve not really tinkered with any kind of settings and just use Steam’s default which is to have a separate C: drive for every Proton game, so does that mean I’d need a separate install of a mod manager for every game? Ideally I’d like to have just one mod manager that recognises all my games (that are supported by the mod manager at least)

LeechBlock for just the browser? And yeah AppArmor for stopping programs from launching.

I’m not sure about markdown but plenty of IDEs can fold eg a method or a class. Off the top of my head I know Geany, Jetbrains, probably most gui text editors/IDEs do. Not sure about markdown specifically, I only use vim for markdown which I know can fold.

That’s great but do you know why the patch was rejected in the first place? If the patch isn’t up to standard I think you should at least raise it however Fedora does their package development so they can address the issue properly

Fair, I don’t live in the US and IME cops haven’t stolen my cash, although tbf I’ve not really had cash lying around when raided or arrested.

But that’s better than cash, where you can’t make a backup

Depends on threat model, eg police will seize phones/computers/devices all the time but will only seize money if they think it’s related to a crime. As long as you’re not being arrested for a money-related charge then your cash would most likely be untouched but your devices will be lost. But of course that issue is circumvented with just off-site backups which are probably just as safe as your cash if cops aren’t interested in your cash.

Death to Germany

The issue is that older kernel versions will lose support and stop getting security updates eventually. I don’t know if there is enough of a community around old CPUs for fixes to be backported by the community.

That’s fair, but in my case ~/scripts/ acts as my prefix. I suppose that narrows down a lot what your prefix can be though, if it has to be a valid path in which your scripts live.

I have ~/.local/bin added to my PATH for things i want in my PATH, and ~/scripts for things I don’t want in my PATH. Both managed by chezmoi. I’m surprised if there’s anyone who wants most of their bash scripts in PATH. I only have like 5 scripts in ~/.local/bin; the others get executed on an automated basis (eg on startup or by a cronjob), or so infrequently that I don’t want them in my PATH.

Yeah it depends. For “What’s the best laptop for Linux”, literally just look it up; there’s hundreds of articles, forum threads, Lemmy/Reddit posts, etc discussing this topic. But I don’t think there’s an issue asking for hardware recs if you are explaining a specific use-case. I would say still do an online search first—like some use-cases are quite general, e.g. for music production, for gaming, and so on. And even for the most general cases, I think if your thread is more something like “does anyone else disagree that ThinkPads are good for Linux?” that’s also fine, because it’s actually sharing your opinion and giving something more to go off of than “give me a laptop”.

I would personally get a second hand cheap laptop off ebay or a local 2nd hand electronics store, and then just install the distro of your choice on it. Can’t really think of an instance where a computer would come with an OS and I’d just use it as-is rather than installing my own, but I guess if you want a fairly generic eg Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc setup then it could work. But definitely don’t limit yourself to preinstalled laptops, since installing an OS only takes an afternoon if you pick an OS with a more fine-grained install like Arch or Gentoo, and about the same time as installing user software for distros that have more streamlined installs.

https://linux-hardware.org/

My main reason is one you listed. My setup works well for me; I enjoy it; and I don’t feel the need to fix what ain’t broke (when the “fix” likely involves breaking a lot of things I need to fix, and generally a lot of time and effort). Plus, from what I can tell, if you are particular about parts of your system, the immutable distros on offer are not diverse enough to cater to you—eg can I use my preferred init system, runit? All the immutable distros I know are systemd (which I am not a big hater of, but I like and am accustomed to runit already).

Edit: saw what you said at the end about what it would take for me to switch. It would be if I had a real use case for it, eg I regularly had problems that an immutable distro would solve, or I could see a way that an immutable distro would drastically improve my workflow.

Waybar/polybar or one of the scriptable widget systems.