With a machine like that, you’re firmly in the mainstream of linux. Almost any distro will run well on it, so selection is a matter of taste.

Debian is a solid, conservative option, though they have a reputation of lagging behind other distros in terms of software versions. I do like arch, their wiki is first rate. It has the reputation of being finicky but I’ve always found it pretty straightforward. Great for the extensive docs and not trying to insulate you from the system.

I personally would avoid ubuntu these days, they seem to be leaning into the Ubuntu Way for things like installing software. A bit lock-in ish for me.

FWIW I’m running nixos on my thinkpads, works great. Nixos is not to be undertaken lightly, there’s a lot to learn and docs are meh. Stability is second to none, and the declarative configuration management makes it great for easing into devops.

to me the main difference was having to use a different package manager. so no biggie really. and arch has an awesome wiki. the documentation made things too easy so now I use nixos BTW

for xmonad commands. also windows-p is dmenu.

I dunno about ‘friendly’, but my setup is minimal configuration and about as stable and unchanging as the terminal. Its xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. My xmonad configuration is extremely minimal because I mostly don’t care about customization. I set terminal=alacritty and the thickness and color of the outline around the focus window, and that’s it.

Because I have xfce backing me up, I get the benefit of monitor layout, mouse settings, the xfce session logout window, etc etc.

As for using xmonad itself. You’re just going to have to pull up the keyboard reference on your phone until you can get around ok, there’s no help and no explanation. When you boot into it you get a blank screen lol.

For launching programs, you windows-p and you get the dmenu program launcher at the top of the screen. Type the first few letters of whatever program and hit enter.

To me the main thing is to relate to a computer as a programmable device, not just a shiny box with pictures and videos. To that end, it might be more effective to have the computer be in command line mode rather than it just being a conduit to youtube.

I started on an apple II at a friend’s house. BASIC was built right in to the command line. Our family ended up with a TRS-80 compatible which also had BASIC. Back then everything you needed to know was in the TRS-80 basic manual. I spent hours and hours making games on it.

Perhaps something like LOGO? Some simple command line environment where the knowledge required is small, and there are easily reachable payoffs for making loops and so forth.

but ctrl-c to cancel terminal tasks predates the 1980s. the inconsistency came in when apple decided to ignore that precedent and introduce ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v as shortcuts in their graphical UI.

to achieve consistency, probably better to invent a new terminal type that does away with the accumulated cruft of 50 years. problem is you would also need new cli programs to go with it.

I get those 3 bulleted features in my terminal, alacritty. But not with Shift. For highlighting I’m pretty much limited to selecting text with the mouse and ctrl-shift-c.

For more sophisticated text selection, tmux comes to mind. Default key bindings appear to be emacs-esque, though vi style is possible too. Custom keybindings are possible as well. It does seem like you may be forced to enter a special mode for selection rather than having that available all the time with just shift.

Its less work to use keyboard shortcuts to arrange/navigate windows in tiling than it is to use a mouse + alt-tab. Window sizing and placement is something you think about a lot less. Its very fast to flip through various preset window arrangements and usually that’s good enough for whatever task.

I got a oneplus 6 to install nixos, but I’m currently using LineageOS as I kind of got stuck on the nixos install, and I needed a phone. I previously had nixos on a pinephone and it was cool but too slow to use seriously.

I have a second oneplus 6 with a wonky usb port, am going to try to fix that and maybe give nixos another go. Sounds like its even more hassly than I thought!

Glad to see someone’s working the bugs out.

maybe search for system76 too. I found one on my local craigslist.

loving my recently acquired T480. not the fastest by any means, but solid and great keyboard. plus non-soldered memory allows for upgrades. got mine off craigslist for 120, a steal.

plateaued since when? if you look at the second half of the graph, 2022 forward, it looks more steep to me.

I take it ‘geometric mean’ is the geometric mean of ‘statcounter’ and ‘steam’? What’s the specific source of those latter two measures? For instance, when I look at linux usage on the statcounter website I get more like 1.5%, not 4%.

they only offer the one laptop, a T480. Not an HP, Dell, etc. Ongoing fixes to the UEFI and BIOS code are irrelevant as this has libreboot instead. That’s like saying you’re missing out on windows updates if you run linux.

And anyway the T480 is at end of life:

This product is no longer being actively supported by development (End of Development Support) and no further software updates will be provided.

I’ve had good luck with an X201, W520, and T480 - all thinkpads. Haven’t tried any of the lower end lenovo models. I got my W520 new and my other ones off craigslist.

If you’re looking to get a preinstalled OS and from a refurb vendor, an interesting option would be buying from libreboot. Debian/KDE by default or you can choose your own distro. Libreboot is a good cause, and sales funds the project. You’ll have the most secure bios on the block.

love mine I got on craigs for cheap. works great and upgraded to 32G with memory from my old dead laptop.

I’m following the progress of nixos on snapdragon, but its still a bit early for me. Audio kind of working but might damage your speakers, webcam not working, crashing on 64G version but not 32G, etc. Also some funny business about needing windows for firmware or something. These issues are getting resolved but aren’t completely solid yet IMO.

Don’t know where things stand on the more mainstream distros but I’m guessing its probably similar.

I switched to nixos years ago. Its better now than it ever has been as far as available packages and etc. But it does present issues if you get off the beaten path - the “now you have two problems” issue. For instance:

• if software is not packaged for nixos already, you won’t be able to follow the ‘build from source’ directions on its github page or etc. You have to make a nix package or at least development environment first. That can be tricky and you won’t have help from the software dev.
• If software downloads exes that require libraries to be in a certain standard location, well, they won’t work. Android studio for instance, downloads compilers and so forth. There are workarounds, mostly, but it can take a while to discover and get working and I’m sure many people give up. Again, the android studio software and documentation will be no help at all.

That said, more and more projects are supporting nix, and nixpkgs has gotten really big. I think they support more packages than any other distro now.

I use nixos. But the package manager its based on, nix, can be used on other OSes.

nix can deal with this kind of problem. Does take disk space if you’re going to have radically different deps for different apps. But you can 100% install firefox from 4 years ago and new firefox on the same system and they each have the deps they need.