So, not the droid we Are looking for… :(

From my small experience with Qualcomm in the past, I’m not too hopeful. In a company I used to work for, we wanted to use one of their SoC with Linux, which they claimed they supported. It was many years ago. But was full of closed binary blobs which even when signing NDAs, we couldn’t get the source for. We’re talking user-space drivers, sensors offloaded to a separate core with closed source firmware etc. It’s Linux, but it’s not Linux in spirit, it feels so closed and proprietary and secretive. They’re coming from Android, which google architecturally enabled vendors to close their drivers by utilizing HAL. It’s the single most significant blow to Linux by any corporation so far. It enabled thousands of vendors to close their shitty driver in user-space and not maintain it for newer kernels (kernel driver is just an IO proxy for user-space drivers). I get that without it, there wouldn’t be Android phones we have today, but I expected them to slowly open up. 10+ years later, almost nothing changed, in fact - things seem worse to me.

This looks the most promising. I’ll take a closer look. Does it provide a rtsp stream?

Compatibility is iffy on some of the newer ones. Here’s a list of what works for some of them: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

If it works for you, don’t touch it, great. Manjaro mostly just works, but occasional headaches I kept getting, like packages being broken for days at a time, no easy place to look for solution (their repo being different to arch’s makes 99%of the difficulty) made me switch to arch/endeavorOs. Eventually, they may get stable enough to be acceptable, but I don’t think their way is the right way to do it and they may even harm or slow down arch development and community in the process. Just looks like arch with extra steps, so I always recommend endeavorOs, Garuda or plain Arch, before Manjaro. But that doesn’t mean Manjaro is trash and in some cases, it may even be the best solution.

Yes, that’s exactly it. You could try out and see what you prefer. I tried everything, but also tastes change over time. I used to use KDE cause it felt more like windows (we’re talking XP era), later I tried Gnome, Unity, xfce, fluxbox, but then I tried i3 and it is really minimal and tiling and I don’t need anything more. Not for beginners, but after some time, it might become your jam.

Kinda like that, but a bit more. Those are desktop environments, which differ in more than just styling. Most popular ones are gnome, KDE, xfce, but there are dozens of others. Most distributions come with one directly supported, but you can install others usually and pick at login.

Well, I think it’s a valid comment. I’m a big fan of her work and I watched a few streams, but the voice seems like it’s heavily processed, and to me it’s barely intelligible, which makes me concentrate really hard to try and understand what she’s saying. I ended up not listening to her streams. I now prefer to read blogs and other people’s articles about her and Asahi linux in general.

Can’t help you directly, but powertop can be used to monitor/tweak momentary power usage.

Is the game playable? Might try it if so.