As someone else mentioned the framework pro is a good pick and also the cool new kid on the block with the repair and upgradablity(however you spell that). However spec and build quality wise, any high end business laptop will have full linux support since their be used for IT/software dev and robust enough construction to not break in a few years

That Dell looks good, ive heard good things about the new Lenovo too, really just go with whichever option is cheaper

OP this is a great laptop if this commenter is selling at a reasonable price since Dell has official linux support on this laptop since dev work is one of its main purposes

GOG? They’re objectively more in line with Linux ideals then Steam will ever be, considering GOG games are 100% usable without the launcher and they didnt pioneer micro transactions

Depends on your ROM, if your running stock android/ASOP/LineageOS I believe theres programs that can change the look of parts of the OS without root, but I don’t have experience with them. I had a locked Samsung and their UI is probably the most customizable without rooting your device since you can change practically everything with goodlock

Not sure what your idea of flat means with a launcher since thats more up to the theme you choose, but if your looking to get away from the stock launcher look I really like Kvaesitso, ive got it setup to have 3px of rounding and 80% transparency with blur

If your looking for a more skeuo look turn the opacity of your background boxes way down and it can look prettt good with a more skueo icon pack

Photo by me!

Actaully super nice using it with KDE or a independant window manager- But then you just have all the desktop packages installed anyway so my resource useage is the exact same as my arch setup…

Alpine is amazingly small compared to other bare bones distros, but that saved 10mb of ram doesn’t mean much when your desktop and browser are using a gig

Havent used it but from what I see it looks like a configured guix setup, like how fedora atomic desktop is to ublue

KDE is commited to keeping the desktop itself SystemD agnostic. Their new login manager does depend on SystemD, but you can run KDE Plasma from any login manager

SystemD isnt exactly a program but more of a group of projects, the only “core” SystemD software on most distros is the init system… Which you can run completely without SystemD’s UserDB system (the part being talked about in the post).

Basically this means you as a user dont have to do anything but switch away from projects that depend on SystemD’s UserDB (like Gnome), not SystemD as a whole

However if you do want to move away from SystemD as a whole you can replace your init system with another one, gentoo’s wiki is a good starting point for learning a bit more: wiki. Personally I love using openrc but of you have no need to touch init files… Dont switch