I have a friend here in the US who is on a visa and is planning on leaving the US after undergrad and doing grad school in Europe somewhere

Agreed. I got the 16/512 (max specs) M1 Air for a decent price for the performance and battery life, and I currently run Linux on it, but I'm constantly bottlenecking both the RAM and SSD and it sucks that I can't upgrade it, will probably get a Framework when it dies

Great battery life on macOS, although turns out a lot of it involves software-related optimizations since with Asahi Linux it's barely better than x86

For accessing past threads I use LibRedirect and cycle between instances

just wait until Republicans suddenly turn anti-2A

Use nix home-manager or guix home and put your configs in a git repo (this is my guix home config for reference)

You'd rather side with a Trump supporter than someone who refuses to vote for genocide? That says a lot.

I'm not really sure. One of the most common complaints among the less extreme portions of the right is that the left is too intolerant and strict and not fun to be around. And being more welcoming of the person themselves, even while acknowledging to yourself that their beliefs are severely flawed (possibly due to factors such as propaganda, peer pressure, religious beliefs), might be a way to help capture that crowd and work to win them over.

At the same time, there needs to be a line drawn somewhere where the person is clearly being malicious and possibly dangerous and is a lost cause. Stuff like "your body my choice", using slurs, praising suicides of marginalized people, etc isn't worth tolerating. Also when it comes to group activities, allowing these sort of people and ideas makes minorities uncomfortable, so when they leave to someplace more comfortable now your group is just full of Nazis. I seen no problem with cutting these sort of people out.

Do you live in a city with sane transit? (Also I put more effort into avoiding cars than basically everyone I know where I live, nobody else I know uses a bike.)

I considered using pijul but everything in Nix/Guix is oriented around git as are the plugins for my text editor and CLI, and there aren't good self-hosted web frontends that I can use to put pijul projects on my linkedin profile or whatever. I want to switch to it but the ecosystem surrounding it needs to actually exist first.

nah we should let the poors die then sell their body parts