I am on a pixel 7 with graphene OS. Been great. Ive been using this phone for about a year or so now.

Played this on steam remote play together. Worked well.

Fedora 40 KDE. I like it. Longest I have been on the same distro in years.

I use a Deadman switch I wrote myself. I have an encrypted vault that contains information that my wife/children may need to gain access to our health benefits, my life insurance policy info, my PII (code to my personal firesafe containing my SSN, birth cert, etc etc.), my bank account info, steps to file for debt forgiveness on my CCs (I pay a small amount per 100 dollars on my CCs that will wipe them if a supported life/death event happens), college tuition savings accounts for my kids and more.

Basically my goal is to make sure that my family has access to all of our assets and money since I manage our finances, and they have enough Info to change any accounts over to their email and info. I haven't told them yet but I have been stashing money as well (both in physical cash and a max contribution Roth IRA). If I ever die, I try and keep enough money in cash that no one knows about that will pay for all of their living expenses for a minimum 1 year. Since I do all of the budgeting, I can account for this before the spendable money is made aware to everyone. They would probably hate me now since we run pretty tight on money, but if I ever die I think they'll forgive me.

I play about 50% of my playtime on my steam deck. I reduced my shooters because even though I like gyro aiming it still will never be as good as my keyboard and mouse.

My bad! You may have totally said that and I missed that part.

You might want to look at the dell XPS 13 series. Their small bezels in the more recent models put them more in line with a MacBook 11 inch. Might be best bang for the buck as far as performance.

I am super partial to old ThinkPads. Currently I am running an x1 yoga gen 4 that I got from a company that was recycling it for free. I also have a P52, and a t460s. All have been great. I have used several others including an x230, an x201, a w520, w530 and w540(least favorite due to the trackpad). Generally I like to stop at about the Intel 8th gen series as parts are usually still fairly serviceable and affordable.

I like KDE. But when I need x11 or something lighter weight, I use budgie.

At this point in my life I would use Fedora Budgie/Xfce/lxde for a lightweight distro. Atomic or not. Lately I've been into atomic, but there are some scenarios and software I use that do not play well with the immutable OS.

I find stuff like this a little bit condescending and cringe. But, at the end of the day I believe groups have the right to associate with who they please, I just won't join any of these groups.

I learned python by finding something I wanted to make, then referencing the documentation to learn things I didn't already know.

If I had trouble with finding it in the docs or understanding, I would just YouTube it/ duckduckgo it until I found a video that made sense.

I just did that over an over again and now about 30% of my day job is writing python.

That is a fair point. But for CAD work I am unsure of a better option with used ThinkPads. Currently I am running an x11 DE with proprietary drivers on mine and it is acceptable even though it isn't perfect.