My list is a bit software developer-centric, but can be useful for development-adjacent tasks too.

• The Github CLI - great for doing routine GH work, like opening PRs or filing issues.
• glab - ditto for Gitlab.
• jq - JSON parsing, formatting, searching and modification.
• pup - like jq, but for HTML pages.
• sed - A powerful text find-and-replace tool with regular expressions.
• scp - File transfers over SSH.
• xargs - run a command for every line of output from another command. Great for automating manual tasks.
• curl - make any type of HTTP (and many other protocols) request from the command line.
• tar - compress/uncompress archive files.
• pwgen - generate passwords with lots of options.
• uuidgen - generate universally unique ids.
• exiftool - read and modify image/video/audio file metadata. Good for adding/editing tags/albums/dates/etc.

Same laptop and distro here, and I agree. But still hoping to have proper sleep/hibernation, speaker/mic support and web cam in the future. It’s a shame that Qualcomm and Lenovo haven’t been more cooperative on hardware support.

Funny how Microsoft does this just before the October EOL deadline for Windows 10, when a whole bunch of hardware is being forcibly obsoleted…

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.

Oh, hi! I also use Kubuntu, but I love Snaps! I use them for everything. I even tried to use a Snap-version of the kernel, but it completely destroyed my system so I had to reinstall… but other than that, they’re great.

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.

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?

If you’re in the market for a new machine, there are better options in terms of affordability and usability, even if you’re specifically looking for an ARM device

Are you thinking of Snapdragon X1 Elite/Pro laptops? I use one of those (Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x) and while it’s really neat, they’re also lacking a lot of peripheral support and drivers at the moment.

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.

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!

Wait, encryption counts as bullshit now? ;)

What brand is it? I’m waiting for my crowdfunded mini PC which will definitely be running Linux, so I’m curious as to other people’s experiences.

I think I’ve used it once in 15 years or so. It’s typically easier to go with bash or Python.

I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.