Ive had an excellent time with the thinkpad e14 w/ ryzen 5500u. Worked flawlessly with both void and gentoo. Same drivers and config as any ryzen based desktop CPU.
Best part is the price - you can snag one used for 300~ USD and it can do everything my desktop can save for cutting edge AAA gaming or server hosting
Ive had an excellent time with the thinkpad e14 w/ ryzen 5500u. Worked flawlessly with both void and gentoo. Same drivers and config as any ryzen based desktop CPU.
Best part is the price - you can snag one used for 300~ USD and it can do everything my desktop can save for cutting edge AAA gaming or server hosting
gentoo!
i love the versatility it offers, but it’s very much so DIY. it has great documentation. anyone who considers themselves a “linux enthusiast” should try an install in a VM at some point or another, if nothing else it’s a great learning experience.
for gaming in particular: flatpak steam / lutris / bottles. it’s great because it’s completely distro agnostic. i can take the $USER/.var directory and put it on any distro with flatpak installed and it’ll just work.
Although I use sway, I used KDE for a long time and XFCE prior. They’re both phenomenal. I’d love to see XFCE make its way to wayland in the future.
As an aside, I feel like Wayland has a market ripe for the introduction of lightweight DEs. Sure, it has the very lightweight (hyprland, sway, river, dwl) and heavyweight (KDE, Gnome) but nothing between like XFCE, LXDE or MATE