These people should be hung, drawn and quartered

Alpine package manager and use of MUSL over glibc are pretty similar to a BSD. Like others have pointed out there are limits to how closely a Linux distro can match the deliberate structure of those distros given the different design philosophy

OpenRC works just fine for me

Dinosaurs would be fun, and would accurately portray canonical

There are a few projects like lima and crossroads (not sure about name, might be crossover) by canonical which create a new user in /home and runs ubuntu “natively” on M series chips.

I’d be tempted to stick with macOS and get an M3, then run linux in a VM with QEMU or whatever. Given your focus on ergonomics I don’t see any other hardware that will match your expectations.

Refurb models come with i5 processor at 3.5Ghz and 4GB RAM but has another slot you can put another chip into (or replace both with 8GB RAM chips). The processor is also replaceable so you could hit a higher clock speed. Everything in a thinkpad is modular including the screen so you can pretty much do what you want with it.

Edit: Yeah, tbf I skimmed over your spec list. Not sure why the apple hardware or the CPU generation is important, especially for the latter where the clock speed is what really matters. Could probably put 16GB RAM in each slot.

Edit2: X1 Carbon or something from that series would probably match the lightweight requirement although they are less modular. No replacing the CPU.

Thinkpad T420

It does get better with some of the more advanced distros. Perversely they are easier to run and maintain. The beginner distros try to hide the complexity to make everything more user friendly but these abstractions can be more confusing than the fundamentals they are hiding.

However there’s nothing people online can do if you don’t find linux interesting enough to do a deep dive on it.

Depends how much time you spend in the terminal but if you spend a lot of time there then it can just about replace a tiling VM with a maximised terminal screen. Has full functionality to add workspaces, sessions and split windows horizontally/vertically.

I partially get around the loss of my tiling WMs on my work PC (macbook) by leaning heavily into tmux. I know there are MacOS tiling managers like spectacles but I prefer using applications that are multiplatform so I have “transferable skills”.

I use XFCE when not on tiling WMs

Thanks for explaining

NixOS sounds like ansible in OS form and that has never seemed appealing. Happy to hear why my impression is wrong though!

You need to check PorntonDB

I’m somewhat proud my generation is actively seeking out parody porn. Those videos tend to be higher budget and more sex positive (less gonzo misogyny).

Edit: well, should caveat that by saying relatively less misogynist

This is the monkey’s paw Year of the Linux desktop. I know we’re wankers but didn’t need reminding!

I thought the rustc package bootstrapped itself like gcc does?

I don’t think I’ve ever lost more time than I’ve gained in knowledge from the mistakes, if that makes any sense.

Never lost any money with linux.

Nothing could get me to switch off gentoo at this point. It’s so flexible that you can use package managers from other distros (if you’re crazy and like to create problems for yourself). Creating your own packages is very easy with their ebuild system. In terms of the packages they offer the USE flags are an absolute killer feature that let you install only the parts of the program you want. They even have binary versions of larger programs like firefox or rust that you can install if you don’t want to compile them.