I like Debian. To save you the misery, though, you should probably just use the OBS Flatpak with it. I used to be a “native” pedant, but these days, I at minimum consider Flatpak a VERY necessary evil, if an evil at all.

Every time I work with a Mac, Hackintosh, etcetera, the 5K upscale of XP Bliss is my default as a joke (except I think near the end of one school year, where I set the background to something from OS 9).

It was even my iPhone background for a while, though right now, it’s a random James Webb image.

Autism has little to do with it - I’m on the spectrum and I have “proprietary” Star Trek wallpapers on all my Linux machines - Ent D and DS9 on desktop, DS9 crew on laptop, Cerritos on that one old Chromebook I installed Bcachefs Debian Testing on for fun once, Borg cube on my Surface…

Now my wallpaper choices and overall Star Trek fandom… you could probably make a reasonable guess on where that comes from. 😉

iPhone, mostly because of family.

I eventually want to jump to Lineage on Pixel, but that’s not an option for me currently.

My Thinkpad has the factory Windows install on its factory-installed drive, but I only booted it once and otherwise never use it. As the laptop has 2 M.2 slots, I just installed a 2 TB SSD in its secondary slot and installed Debian 12 on it right after I opened the box. I nearly always use that install.

I recently had an exam where the spyware test monitoring Chrome extension was mad about me using Linux (I only use Chromium when I have an exam - otherwise I just use Firefox), so I had to use one of the Windows machines in the lab. This was weird, because I’ve taken other tests (including after this incident) that didn’t have a problem.

Back in high school, I had to use a Chromebook and the occasional iMac, though the Chromebook is technically a Linux device.

(Sobs in Brave Little Toaster noises)

I’m an XFCE guy. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It’s decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.

For now, it’s still on xorg, but I think they’re working on it.

Xfce

Admittedly, that irks me slightly just because of the shared name with the devices folder in root, but do what works for you.

Yeh, I think it has to do with some CPU topology crap. I have it working pretty well, luckily - I once had an old Virtualbox VM with MacOS that I needed, and I was able to boot it in my Windows VM.

With Lightroom, you’re right on that. Honestly, the state of FOSS image editors is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how good FOSS vector editors like Inkscape are these days compared to their commercial, proprietary counterparts.

I can see that. I nuked my Windows partition years ago, though. Honestly, if I find a software is jerk enough to block virtualization, I don’t find it worth using.

I personally use LUKS + clevis with a TPM on my Thinkpad.

Something like that. In my setup, I passthrough my RX 580 (my nicer card) and have my RX 550 (a dirt cheap one I got for ~$85 on sale) stay connected to the host.

I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It’s not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you’re up for it, I used this tutorial. If it’s an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I’m going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).

pythonz

My parents had that same worry when I tried to get a used laptop. If it’s what you have to do to convince them, then maybe look into a newer Thinkpad. I have an E16 AMD with a Ryzen 5 7000 series. I initially had some minor issues with the Wi-Fi modem, but I found some kernel parameters that fixed it. Otherwise, it’s been very smooth-sailing.

But when do we get Xkcd at 1024x1 in Netscape Navigator 3.0 on a Pentium III±1 emulated in JavaScript on an Apple IIGS?

You’ll probably notice very little difference, especially if you go with one of the default partition layouts. If you were to manually lay it out, you’d need to make sure you have an EFI partition on a GPT partition table, but otherwise it should be normal.

Like others have said, Secure Boot can be miserable, but in my experience, it works automagically with Debian so long as you stick to official kernel packages. The only hiccup I’ve had before (assuming a normal kernel package) is that on my shiny new Thinkpad E16, I had to go into the UEFI settings and enable non-Microsoft certificates (it was a single toggle). After that, my experience with Debian was pretty smooth (I had a minor issue with Wi-Fi, but it’s not relevant to your question).

It’s moot for me know because my Go sits on my home desk. The initramfs got borked during the Trixie time_t64 transition, and I should have just chrooted and fixed it, but I just let it be because I was sort of done with it. I threw Debian on a beat-up old Lenovo Yoga that I brought on a few trips before getting my Thinkpad E16, which I love, especially after I got that one Wi-Fi card bug sorted out.

On the “web without Linux”, I imagine it probably would have been scattered across a few proprietary Nixes until FreeBSD emerged from the AT&T lawsuit, upon which FreeBSD would have become the dominant web server.

I kind of disagree. I had a miserable experience with my 1st gen Go. The cameras were hard to set up and the power states were really buggy; after going to sleep a few times, the system (Debian Testing) would get unstable with weird graphical glitches and I’d have to reboot.

I might recommend a 2-in-1 Thinkpad. I can’t speak for all models, but my 1st generation Surface Go brought me misery when running Debian Testing on it - power profiles weren’t supported quite right and the camera was hard to set up.

If you have the budget, the Star Lite seems pretty nice as a Linux tablet, although you should do your own research - I don’t own one. Personally, I have a Thinkpad E16 for college.