... and unfortunately so is Share Point.

My issue is that I can’t find ANYTHING on the PC market that is as slick or full featured as a MacBook Air (minus its limited ports).

Hi. Typing this on M2 Air, running Gentoo. 👋

The limited ports drive me crazy too, but what's maybe EVEN MORE frustrating, is the glossiness of the screen. It is not that good to be used outside, especially because it is dust and finger print magnet. I'm constantly wiping the screen. One thing that smudges the display seems to be the fact that some parts of the base touches the display when the lid is closed. Bad design, or I may just have a faulty specimen. The touchpad is needlessly big, but isn't really a problem. My wrist can't bend so that I could move my finger easily from corner to corner. :D Touchpad haptic stuff is nice when dragging. Keyboard is... meh. Nothing special. Then there's the money problem. You have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to jump off from the base model. I have 256GB/8GB model. The least I should have accepted is 16Gigs of RAM. I got this Air for only for 300 euros (luck was involved), so a money well spent to get to know current Apple HW. But still... I feel I barely made a good deal (because my last laptop was Matebook D with the same amount of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD). I'll keep using this until I cannot cope with the amount of RAM anymore.

Battery life, performance and passively cooled CPU are the main highlights. Oh and the DAC can drive high impedance heaphones (I have Beyerdynamic DT-770 250 Ohm). I'm most disappointed to the display. The LCD under the glass is fine, but the glass itself is just horrible design. From now on: I choose only matte displays.

I think you're much better off with Framework. I think that'll be eventually my choice too.

Yay! Wayfire.

Been using Wayfire for quite some time now. I'm tempted to test out xfce.

baby separated values?

You're not alone with your opinion.

Hm... I don't see it stating anything about wayland, but since it says "native" in some many places, I need to assume it won't use Xwayland, unless specifically told to.

Right? Anyone to confirm?

4GB is barely enough. But you can limit the compilation threads to save memory. For big compilations you should reserve around 1.5GB per compilation thread.

As for celeron... You'd better use binary host, at least for big packages (or have your own binary host).

Here I have one old Chromebox for which I flashed coreboot into.

2024-03-13T09:59:14 >>> net-libs/nodejs-20.11.0: 3:36:15
2024-05-10T05:02:52 >>> net-libs/nodejs-20.12.1: 6:12:09
2024-10-01T00:25:35 >>> net-libs/nodejs-22.4.1-r1: 7:24:58
2024-12-26T01:43:48 >>> net-libs/nodejs-22.4.1-r1: 15:32:58

The three first lines show compilation times of nodejs with quite normal compilation settings. On the last line I enabled some ridiculous optimizations, like -funroll-loops and -fipa-pta but also -lto (which probably contributes the most of the compilation time increase). I've retired this box now, but I might give it a new life as some home automation box.

Obligatory fastfetch.

panther-box ~ # fastfetch --logo none
root@panther-box
----------------
OS: Gentoo 2.17 x86_64
Host: Panther (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 6.1.110-panther-0.3.1
Uptime: 36 days, 18 hours, 10 mins
Packages: 701 (emerge)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Theme: Adwaita [GTK3]
Icons: gnome [GTK3]
Cursor: Adwaita
Terminal: tmux 3.4
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) 2955U (2) @ 1.40 GHz
GPU: Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller @ 1.00 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 950.19 MiB / 15.50 GiB (6%)
Swap: 7.00 MiB / 20.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 13.37 GiB / 14.94 GiB (90%) - xfs
Disk (/home): 133.21 MiB / 1.94 GiB (7%) - xfs
Disk (/var): 1.57 GiB / 1.94 GiB (81%) - xfs
Disk (/var/cache/pkg): 12.98 GiB / 19.94 GiB (65%) - xfs

... and because I had some 8GB DDR3 SODIMM RAM sticks I stuffed the maximum amount in there. If I was on 4GB, I'd use binhost or tune the compilation settings so that the process would use as little memory as possible.

Admit it. You just zoomed in to see how accurate the recursion really is.

Predictions of which will win the race?

• noveau being useful with new nVidia GPUs
• we'll reach the year of Linux desktop

It's pretty maintenance free.

The following will make the experience a bit more seamless:

• use stable packages
• use sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel or syskernel/gentoo-kernel-bin
• use sys-boot/grub or better yet sys-boot/refind which auto-recognizes the latest kernel in your boot directory

I don’t mind a complicated install

After you have "installed" Gentoo there will be quite lot of installing of different programs to build your own customized distro. However if you yse systemd you'd get quite a lot in one strike, since systemd contains a whole lot of the central core components, like system logger (journald). The other route is to use OpenRC and with it sysvinit or openrc-init and choose the rest of the components.

Asking your question (the one I'm replying to) at the Gentoo forums may give you better answers and tips how to build maintenance free setup.

I've used Linux since about 2004 for personal use. On my homer server(s) and desktop. 95% of them Gentoo (stable). For my relatives I've installed some EL workstation distro. Especially my father needs a install-and-forget system, which Windows isn't.

But I do install and fix Windows PCs at my work. It's because how Windows works (or rather not work) I get paid. That said, the more I use Windows the more I get frustrated with it.

One of the worst things lately was the accidental activation of BitLocker. It got activated even when the user didn't have Microsoft account (from where he/she would retrieve the encryption key to decrypt the data if Windows decides to lock the drive). "Oh I'm sorry, but because M$ fuckup your data is gone. Do you have backups? 😇" To avoid any BitLocker issues the secure boot should be disabled. BitLocker shouldn't then be available for activation.

Some of the frustrating sides of Windows can be avoided by using Pro version of Windows. But that's simply not enough.

IMO the only reason to use (suffer from) Windows is if you play some games that require it.

... but there's an Atari sticker. Bothers me!