Who need a fast computer. I once make do with this setup for a few days. No brand El-cheapo Android tablet + mechanical keyboard. I still use it to test websites: if it usable on here, it is usable everywhere.
derek-zhou
dimitarvp
Dude, you should be cloned and the eyes of the clones should be used as implants for people like me.
Give me that setup for one week and I might be legally blind. 
2
derek-zhou
It is a badly lit picture. The keyboard has backlight, and the tablet screen, while not the brightest, is plentiful bright. And I wear reading glasses.
1
dimitarvp
It’s not only the brightness and contrast though. They are important, yeah, but most cheap screens have bad text legibility – the letters are not clear. Combine that with the smaller font and/or bad refresh rate and I guarantee I’ll be tired in 3 hours max.
There’s a reason I went for a very expensive Mac. It was the first display in my life that legitimately did not torture my eyes. After that I discovered others, of course, but Mac displays just have some dark magic behind them that apparently nobody else wants to duplicate.
1
Kevo
Be careful what you wish for. I’ve been hoping for years that Linux would catch up and become as reliable and usable as MacOS even 3-4 versions behind, but I still don’t think it’s there yet. I’ve been through about 4 distros over the past couple of years and I don’t think I’d take any of them over MacOS for general purpose use as a desktop. I’ve run into frustrating problems with all of them and the companies/devs managing these different distros don’t particularly inspire confidence either. If you’re motivated you can certainly make it work, but it’s like adding another thing you have to manage and become expert in. I’ve got too many of those already.
1
dimitarvp
Yeah that’s part of the research. I use Manjaro for several years now and only had an issue twice I think. They are not perfect but do pretty well. I also heard good things about Void.
So these two at the top of my list of candidates.
You got any other recommendations? And don’t say Ubuntu – that’s the Windows of the Linux world. Very bloated. I want something extremely lightweight but still very functional and not having to assemble everything like you have to do with a raw Arch Linux.
1
derek-zhou
Depends on what you want to do with the “desktop”. I’ve been using Linux full time on the desktop since circa 2011, for development at least. I always have a Mac laptop around for anything too unwieldy on Linux though. Only since circa 2019, I moved my Linux PC to the basement and retired my last Linux laptop and went full Mac on the desktop.
My current job is unrelated to development and I have a company issued windows laptop for office work. So, to move to Linux on the desktop/laptop again, it is just back to pre-2019 situation for me.
1
D4no0
I got frustrated the last 4 times I broke my debian installation in less than 2 months trying to update some incompatible drivers and I switched to nixos + plasma6.
I can say that for me it checks all the boxes, love the immutable configuration and ability to do rollbacks, love the declarative nature, the package manager has all the packages I need. Plasma covers all my UI needs, not that I care a lot about advanced functionality in this regard.
Nix shells are also a cool thing, you basically can create declarative isolated shells with specific dependencies and the versions you might need.
Unless I get into some hard limitations, I will most probably use this distribution on all my linux devices for years to come.
3
dimitarvp
Your fault for using Debian really. 
Their packages model is hopelessly outdated but they are clinging to it with a death grip.
Here I am a bit envious. I really want that but hate Nix with all my heart and am still waiting for Manjaro to have their own immutable distro variant. Which they already have, come to think of it, I’ve been too lazy and sick to try it though. But that’s definitely how it should have always been. No idea what took the collective world so long to figure out elementary good practices…
1
D4no0
How so? Debian is my and many others’ goto for servers, for desktops there are simply too many moving parts, at least for me.
The issues I was getting where I was breaking for example my audio, was not debian specific, but the fact that you remove a bunch of packages and install others, then obivously something goes wrong as something is incompatible. The problem is then restoring the OS to a previous working state, IMO all mutable distributions suffer from this.
1