My incredible hatred and rage for not understanding things powers me on the cycle of trying and failing hundreds of times till I figure it out. Then I screw it all up somehow and the cycle begins again.

Fish, less config and super easy to set things like path, colors, and the support for dev environments and tooling is better than it was. Used to be a Zsh user, but moved since I distro hop so dang much. Less time to get going.

Croc or syncthing depending on what kind of experience you are after. Syncthing if you want to have a shared folder like expert. And croc if you just need to send something. Croc has an app on f-droid, and syncthing is on the app store. Both are open source and pretty for excellent in their own right.

I have an old Lenovo W550s Thinkpad with a 2GB Dedicated Nvidia and an i5 5500U. It’s got two batteries and sips power. It’s only 4 cores, but for what I run it does great. I get fairly consistent 60fps on low settings for “boomer shooters” like Selaco. The thing is an absolute beast and hardly flexes. The plastic is cracked and I can just hand it to my kids without a care in the world. Dump a drink on it, drop it, I could care less. I had them help me change out the RAM and SSD because it’s essentially bound for the dumpster and any value I get out of it is the cherry on top.

That and I can run pretty much and retro gaming console on it to about the Wii/GameCube, which blows my mind. All for probably like $200 of hardware.

Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman

I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.

It consistently ran slower on a few benchmarks I care about like language model performance, which was surprising. Baulders Gate was also jankyier for some reason. I love that people are out trying to do this stuff and the community was nice. Just like anything the reality is often less exciting than the marketing. It is bundled together arch with some hopeful optimizations that I am certain will work for some hardware and some applications, but not all hardware and all applications.