Also, from what I understand, they accept Monero for their laptops.

That’s very cool. I didn’t even know that. Thank you for mentioning that!

Thank you OP for that, but… why should we prefer this over uBlue’s work on streamlining this process?

Thank you for your reply! Much appreciated ☺️!

To clarify, they do jack shit to add major hardware support (etc).

Thanks! That’s the clarification that I needed.

This seems like a disingenuous response.

My apologies if it seemed that way, that wasn’t my intention.

Pop isn’t adding anything much to Linux

In absolute sense, to the kernel; sure.

it’s yet another Debian derivative by way of Ubuntu.

That’s where we clearly differ. It offers (arguably) the easiest installation for Nvidia drivers (which is especially useful for new users). Furthermore, it has other neat functionality like a recovery partition; which is otherwise absent on any other Linux distro (at least that I’m aware off). I agree that these things mostly benefit the new user rather than the established one. Nonetheless, even if we’re not the target audience, we shouldn’t be dismissive of the work that others put into their platform.

Cosmic is cool and all, but it’s mostly just eye candy for GNOME at the end of the day.

How can it be for GNOME if it’s its own Desktop Environment? Sure, it relies on GTK (like most other DEs). But it’s a Rust-based DE, which is (AFAIK) unique and already commendable by itself. Again, I don’t understand if you’re just trying to be dismissive of other people’s work or just being ignorant/misinformed.

System76 also seem to still be developing working with other people skills.

While this particular case is new to me, I can’t say I’m surprised. FWIW, even Linux Torvalds himself needed to put effort in self-improving themselves in this department. Therefore, I don’t quite understand why you felt the need to bring this up. FWIW, I never said or implied that System76 is some holy organization that can’t do anything wrong. You made a vague statement with “The support that these vendors put in for Linux is miniscule” and I only intended to point out some of their continued contributions to ‘Linux’. I could have named any other Linux-first vendor, but System76 seemed to be the most renowned and that’s why I went with that one.

Tuxedo still haven’t as far as I’m aware released ITE829x Linux drivers (in an upstreamable form) for example; I had to reverse engineer the damned chip.

That’s unfortunate. And I think that this short paragraph is the summary of your grievances with these Linux-first vendors. And if that’s the case, then it’s at least worth mentioning that I’m absolutely oblivious of the challenges that you might have faced in this regard.

This sentiment made me very curious into how much laptop vendors contribute to the Linux kernel in general^[1]. Unfortunately, there was not a lot that I could find. Perhaps I’m just very bad at looking into that kinda thing. Therefore, if you’re aware of a (half-)decent way to somehow see how much effort is done by different laptop vendors in order to support hardware on Linux, then please feel free to notify me of that 😊.

Clevo hardware lacks a lot of the polish that you just quietly get from a major manufacturer.

I’d have to take your word on it as you’re clearly more experienced in this regard. But would you be so kind to give an example of two comparable laptops at comparable price-points; one from Clevo and another from a major manufacturer, in which the lack of polish is clearly visible? Like, if I as an average consumer look at the review on the Schenker XMG Focus 16 found on Notebookcheck.net and compare that to the reviews of the laptops it’s compared to in its verdict, then I don’t notice anything significant. Note that I’ve mostly just skimped the reviews*.

Sorry, the 3060ti was conflating my desktop; it’s literally a 2060 which is far worse in terms of termals and power.

No problem. Thank you for clarifying!

I have this laptop. I look at the Linux offerings from these manufacturers. I contribute to them.

Thank you for your continued contributions 😊!

I’m not saying that it’s all bad

This wasn’t clear in your first reply.

and you seem to be taking this as something of a personal attack.

My apologies if it came across like that, I certainly didn’t intend that*. To perhaps better illustrate how I read your first reply, allow me to paste it down below:

It’s fine to like these companies. I want them to succeed, but Clevo as an ODM tend to produce products that lack the polish of a comparable (say) Dell, and don’t achieve the same volume of sales as a major manufacturer to achieve lower costs through increased volume (etc) - the cost savings have to come from somewhere and often that’s the firmware, material design, and design quality.

Agreed. I probably couldn’t have said it better. But, this doesn’t mean that Dell or Lenovo (or any other major manufacturer for that matter) themselves actually accomplish in making good products. Theoretically, they should be able to produce either better (and/)or cheaper devices. However, the fact of the matter is that this simply isn’t the case (or at least not substantially/significantly). The Thinkpads sold today are just an excuse compared to the Thinkpads that were sold in the past. Similarly, Dell’s XPS series shook the market in the past, but now they’ve stuck on a bad implementation of what Apple^[2] deemed unworthy (talking about touch instead real keys for function keys (etc)).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure pretty soon (probs with Meteor Lake already) Dell’s and Lenovo’s Linux offerings (so talking strictly about a subset of their offerings, refer to my earlier reply for the links) will at least be considerable CPU-wise. But until then, if anyone is serious about using their laptop as a proper workstation with somewhat decent battery life^[3], then it’s simply not worth to bother with Dell (like at all) or Lenovo (unless they’re willing to pay a hefty price for it).

So just to be absolutely clear. I don’t categorically dismiss Dell, Lenovo or any other major manufacturer for that matter. But for OP’s requirements, they seem to be (at best) very expensive.

These products are fine, don’t pretend that they’re perfect though, you’re doing them a disservice.

Alright, so I suppose this is a reaction to the following statements of mine:

“Another bold claim; one which only holds true if merely Apple’s finest go beyond “fine”.”

“At which point, the “fine” hardware from the Linux-first vendor not only starts to be attractive but highly desirable by comparison.”

I’m sure my previous paragraph should have been sufficient to explain my thoughts on this. But just in case; they’re not perfect. But -IMO- for OP’s requirements, they’re at the very least worth considering.

1. I, perhaps naively, think that contributions to the Linux kernel are most representative for hardware support. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
2. Suffice to say, Apple actually had put thought into their design. Contrary to Dell’s excuse of an implementation.
3. Reminder; OP explicitly wanted this.

tuxedo/system76/metabox/etc are all rebadged Clevo ODM designs.

Yup, clearly. /s

The support that these vendors put in for Linux is miniscule

Wow, that’s a bold claim if anything. First time seeing a Pop!_OS-denier, I assume you also deny the existence of COSMIC? And these are just some of the work done done by System76 only.

the hardware is “fine” at best

Another bold claim; one which only holds true if merely Apple’s finest go beyond “fine”.

I for one love my desktop 3700x and 3060ti mobile stuffed into a laptop chassis. No compromises were made on this hardware.

Hmm…, very interesting! I’m totally oblivious of the existence of such a thing. If that is your benchmark, then I can actually understand what you meant with your earlier claim. Please feel free to enlighten me on how this works 😊.

Conversely, Dell and Lenovo laptops tend to have very good Linux support and can be had relatively cheaply, especially if you get something that isn’t bleeding edge.

I don’t deny this. However, none of Dell’s laptops with decent Linux support have an AMD CPU (or one of Intel’s latest Meteor Lake CPUs). Thus, at least in terms of battery life, it’s not desirable; with battery life being something that OP has explicitly mentioned. As for Lenovo, the Thinkpad-line (the one generally recommended for its Linux-support) with AMD CPUs starts at a very high price. At which point, the “fine” hardware from the Linux-first vendor not only starts to be attractive but highly desirable by comparison.

My two cents; if you want to use Linux on it, then do yourself a favor and pick a laptop from a Linux-first vendor. So the likes of NovaCustom, Star Labs, System76, Tuxedo and others found on the link over here come to mind. Besides that, it’s important that the device in question either has a dedicated GPU (or at least supports eGPUs). Furthermore, choose a device with relatively high battery capacity; they go up to ~99 Wh, so pick something that’s at least relatively close to that number.

“ABRoot is utility which provides full immutability and atomicity to a Linux system, by transacting between two root filesystems. Updates are performed using OCI images, to ensure that the system is always in a consistent state. It also allows for local atomic changes thanks to the integrated ABRoot package manager, which generates local OCI images with the user’s changes, and then applies them on top of the system’s default image.”

(From ABRoot’s page on Github)

This sounds a lot like what Fedora is trying to achieve with their ostree native containers.

Are there any technical differences between the two? Besides, of course, relying on tools with different names etc*. FWIW, it doesn’t seem as if ABRoot (v2) allows one to pin multiple deployments, while this can be done relatively easily through the sudo ostree admin pin [-u] command on Fedora Atomic.

Deez Nuts.

Deez

This looks kinda cool. Thank you for tagging/pinging me! I’ll take a look and perhaps bother you (or others) at a later moment with questions 😅.

Hmm, one I guess is that it is not “permanent” and deactivates after one command (in Kakoune, you have to explicitly do ‘;’ to collapse the selection to its end (which you can flip with the start using ‘alt+;’) or move around without extending the selection). That’s really the only thing I can think of at the moment and I feel like often it really doesn’t matter tbh, so maybe I was just talking out of my ass there a bit lmao.

Regardless; thank you for mentioning this!

Apparently you can quickly reselect it in vim with ‘gv’ though, which I never checked until now. That’s useful to know.

Hehe, thanks for sharing that; might become useful soon 😅.

One thing I’m really missing from vim though is that it can list directories, has a hex editor, and can read a bunch of other file formats. I think it can even edit remote files over sftp, but maybe I’m confusing that with Emacs. Kakoune just does local text files (though you can of course do stuff like ‘%|xxd’ to pipe the file through xxd to get a hex view, edit and then ‘%|xxd -r’ and save but that feels very very sketchy).

Until yesterday I knew almost nothing about Kakoune. But I’ve since tried to do some reading; while there’s still a lot to uncover and/or explore, I feel as if it tries to offer a more focused experience (for better or worse).

Makes a lot of sense.

Thank you so much for chiming in and sharing your knowledge and experiences! Much appreciated!

Thanks a lot for sharing your insights and experiences on this! Kickstart.nvim has surely caught my interest and I would like to play with it to see how much I can make it resemble LunarVim and the others in functionality and if there’s anything worthwhile that remains to be missing. If not, then perhaps I’ll be relying on Kickstart.nvim instead. Once again; thank you!

Emacs I’m not so sure. If you’ve checked the news anytime for Doom Emacs, you can see the maintainer mentioning how it’s become progressively difficult to maintain the project. I’d imagine it’s a similar story for plugins and other derivatives. People have attempted remaking Emacs from scratch, but there was not enough momentum for it, so that went under.

This is news to me. Thank you so much for mentioning this! I’ll have to look into this.

Have you had a look at the design philosophy behind Kakoune?

I actually hadn’t yet, but I did just now. And I’d have to say that I liked what I read. There’s for sure a lot out there that’s worthy of being explored and I’ve become confident that Kakoune deserves to be further explored as well. Thank you for informing me on that!

I also recommend reading this article here that goes more in-depth on this point and has a comparison of vim, helix and kakoune.

I haven’t read the article yet. But I’m pretty sure it’s going to be another excellent read. Please feel free to share more from where these are coming from 😊! Thank you!

These changes are undocumented and must be discovered and explored organically, while the default behavior is well documented.

This, indeed, is concerning. Thank you for mentioning this!

Kickstart.nvim ads only a few packages that are very popular and provides a base upon which you can customize as needed.

Hmm…, allow me to ask the following: How much effort would it take to get Kickstart.nvim from scratch to where any of the opinionated distros are in terms of functionality?

EWW (short for Emacs Web Wowser) is very basic, only really working with the HTML and not so much the css, and definitely not JavaScript. Don’t expect anything fancier than a blog post to work :P

That’s kinda cool as it decreases the attack vector very significantly. I’ve still got a lot of questions regarding the security implications, but I’m sure I’m not the first one that’s looking for a ‘hardened’ Emacs experience if there’s anything to worry about in the first place.

I’ve indeed been pleasantly surprised by Helix since I’ve started these posts. I’m also more optimistic than initially regarding its future prospects. I’ll look into it and perhaps I’ll have some use for it. Thank you!

I like Spacevim a lot

Have you tried any of the ones mentioned in the OP? If so, would you be so kind to elaborate upon why you prefer SpaceVim over the others?

(inspired by SpacEmacs)

Interesting. Would you be so kind to elaborate on what this entails?

you can use neovim as the underlying vim package as well. Then update init.toml with whatever layers/plugins you want

That seems kinda hella streamlined and straightforward, which is honestly pretty cool. Is this different from how it works on any of the ‘(Neo)Vim distros’ and/or by default?

I honestly believe that Helix will eclipse NeoVim because it’s designed better, the source code is more maintainable, and the philosophy is a bit more balanced and welcoming to users that care more about productivity than customizability. Refactoring Vim’s spaghetti C code is a massive task, and C as a language drags it down. Where the NeoVim ecosystem is currently fractured among many Lua “distributions,” Helix just builds on itself in one source tree. I think starting with a solid core before supporting plugins will be good for the future of Helix.

Perhaps I should have done a better job at formulating the question. Btw, this writing is cool. Thank you for that. I also believe it contains some excellent pointers regarding topics I should read into. However, my question was more related to the following: As you know; it doesn’t matter whichever IDE I’m using, there’s definitely a plugin (or perhaps even built-in functionality) that allows me to utilize my Vi(m)-acquired skills to improve my productivity on any given IDE. Do you think that Helix’ keybindings (I believe they’re at least to some degree inspired by Kakoune) will be similarly found either built-in or as a plugin on whichever random IDE you might come across?

Once Helix has plugins, it might be possible to get something closer to true Vim emulation.

This is the answer I was seeking. Makes sense.

Yea I think Helix is here to stay, and it will continue stealing market share from other terminal editors. It probably won’t convert anyone that’s already invested years in learning and configuring (Neo)Vim, but for newcomers looking for a powerful option with sane defaults, Helix is far easier to get started with.

Perhaps I should have done (yet again) a better job at explaining what I meant. As you know; it doesn’t matter if I’m on some random Linux distro or on macOS, I’m sure that Vi(m) is installed by default and I can rely on it. Same applies to some random remote device I’m accessing; if anything, I can expect that my Vi(m)-acquired skills will be of good use. Do you think that Helix or some of the functionality it offers (from its keybindings to anything (really)) will somehow be beneficial to me in some remote accessed device or any other similar setting?

Of course, all of these questions stem from the fact that -if possible- I want usage of my IDE to be beneficial to how I engage with my text editor and vice versa. Otherwise, these questions don’t make any sense at all. Perhaps, I should instead reconsider if this is important in the first place. Currently, I’m at least naive enough to believe that it’s worth pursuing. But feel free to convince me otherwise 😉!

For completeness’ sake, Helix has definitely peaked my interest. I will look into it and see how I might benefit from it (if at all). Thank you.

It’s unfortunate that nothing really has Kakoune bindings other than Kakoune.

That’s indeed very unfortunate…

And after you type the ‘2w’, the selection shows what you’re about to delete, because it’s a separate command.

That genuinely seems like very useful functionality. Thanks for pointing that out!

Sure, you can use visual mode in vim but it feels like an afterthought in a lot of ways.

Could you perhaps give some examples so that I can better understand/grasp why you feel that’s the case?

Those two are I think the main reasons I like Kakoune.

I haven’t really had problems with it, at least. Maybe because I’ve used vim for a long time before Kakoune. TBH I also don’t really use vim a lot anymore except on one remote machine that isn’t mine.

I am very grateful to you for sharing your experiences as a long time Vim user that currently prefers Kakoune over it. It has definitely impressed me and made me a lot more curious towards it. And I genuinely feel like I should think this over properly before I rashly commit to Vi(m). Thank you for raising such awareness!

I’ve tried so many (Sublime, Atom, PyCharm, Jetbrains stuff, Eclipse ((ew)), Visual Studio code, and neovim)

Hehe, that’s for sure a long list 😜. I’m very curious to learn how your experiences with Neovim went in particular and what ultimately led you to prefer Doom Emacs over it.

I feel like with Doom i’ve concluded my search for the “best” text editor and settled for a highly extensible but also highly intuitive text editor that works right out of the box and can work flawlessly for projects in a lot of the popular languages (I’ve personally used Rust, Haskell, Python and markdown and HTML editing with it). Something I can use forever without succumbing to the enshittification that inevitably lies for most proprietary solutions (end of open source dogma rant)

Honestly, I think you’ve done a great job at vocalizing my ambitions related to Emacs. From, what I’ve seen so far, I can’t envision any other editor that has as much potential to become my ‘endgame’. Though, I’d have to admit that Neovim’s advancements seem very promising. And I can definitely envision some use for it alongside Emacs.

Also, pro tip is, when you’re in a project and want to search for a keyword in one of the files in your project, type then slash (/). Super useful and it’s really fast. Welcome to Doom 😊

Hehe, thanks for the tip! And thank you for welcoming me to Doom 😊!