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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

It's really just an accident of history, not intentional on Apple's part, that Macs became popular with developers. In an alternate universe Jobs isn't kicked out of Apple, doesn't develop NeXT based on Unix, and Apple continues merrily snubbing developers and not accidentally attracting them the way they did. In this alternate universe I believe more energy and funding would have been directed at Linux and it would be a stronger desktop platform.

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Agreed.

What do you think is the best Linux desktop distro these days?

For hardware it seems like the higher-end Dells are the winners. I have a co-worker with one (runs Windows) and the hardware is excellent. He has some issues with the TPM and firmware but it seems like stuff that would not be a big problem in Linux.

For me the most interesting distros are vanilla binary rolling-release ones, which ship all stuff from upstream unchanged. I love Arch, but Slackware and a few others are interesting too.

These make it easy to set up a simple system with few moving parts, which is fast and doesn't break. I just a tiling window manager (xmonad), a terminal (urxvt), a browser (firefox with vimperator) and emacs.

And Nix-style ones, NixOS and GuixSD, are the future. Declarative system configuration and package definitions. Non-destructive changes.

In terms of laptops, I'm really fond of Xiaomi Air 12 M3. Fanless, really good quality, cheap and all stock Intel components. So it just works.

I have Arch with Gnome on the 4K HP Spectre x360 13 inch, and everything basically just works. Even mixed-DPI with a standard HD monitor.

I got a cheezy second hand Lenovo Y40 from Craigslist for about $200 and put Debian on it. Not even close to top of the line but it works great for my development needs.

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