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.

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.

content id is a wild one that I only discovered a year ago: I had always used my own Chromecast when traveling, and I plugged it into a Roku TV which kept saying “did you know you could watch [content that I was currently watching] on Roku” which really freaked me out, so I looked into it. honestly not sure why they tipped their hand like that: I found the setting and turned it off. otherwise I would’ve been none the wiser.

creepy af though. the amount of tracking you implicitly accept by using random devices out in the world is staggering. even if you read every privacy policy and opt out of everything (I do) you have no chance.

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.

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.

I hadn’t heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it’s been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn’t a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!

these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they’ve been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:

• ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I’m worried about long-term availability of replacements
• can’t do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don’t want Bluetooth latency
• they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you’re on a Skype call from 2003

so they are good but don’t solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I’m just doing meetings and listening to music.

yes, I’m using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I’d come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.

fwiw I’ve been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I’ve had to think “oh, I’m on Wayland” are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don’t run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I’ve been very happy especially over the last year or so.

I do not use asahi though so I can’t comment on that specifically.

Yep, there is already a great example of what would happen, and it pretty much proved what many of us believed: governments and employers used it as a surveillance tool, and it’s not a replacement for a real content moderation strategy. People are just as happy to be cruel to each other and spread disinformation even if their real name is attached to it.