Veraxis

I think the voltage boosting microcode bug on 13th and 14th gen are generally considered to have been solved. I have not heard of any issues on the Intel 100/200 series CPUs. I would definitely recommend updating the BIOS on any 13th or 14th gen laptops, though.

I think it is the reverse these days. AMD generally has better power efficiency than Intel.

How cheap is cheap? Truly low-end laptops will generally be worse value than buying used, and low end laptops tend to suffer on some of the more subtle quality of life features with poor-quality screens, cheap trackpads, small batteries, and plastic build quality.

I do not know what others think, but in my experience Asus laptops do not have a good reputation for reliability. Almost everyone I know who has owned one has had them die prematurely, even the relatively high end ones. They are also notorious for having terrible warranty support and customer support.

At least where I live, the used market on places like ebay tend to be flooded with surplus business laptops from the likes of Dell and HP which are only a couple generations old. There are also good deals to be had on refurbished/open box laptops. My most recent laptop is a refurb 16" HP Pavilion plus with a 13500H and generally good screen/battery/build quality for around $450 USD.

I cannot speak to compatibility/optimization differences between Intel and AMD, but AMD is also generally known for better power efficiency, while based on my looking at benchmarks, Intel tends to lead on single-core performance. I think both are viable. I think I would recommend getting whichever you can find the best deals on in your local market and maybe use other features you care about to narrow down the choices before deciding which brand of CPU you want.

Looking at CPU benchmarks like passmark can be a good reference. For example, an Intel i5-1235U and and Intel i7-1255U have the same core count with only a minor clock speed difference, so they benchmark to within single-digit percentages of one another, but the i5 will sell for significantly cheaper on the used market simply because it is called "i5" and not "i7". Meanwhile an i3-1215U has a lower core count and significantly worse performance, and so should probably be avoided.

Arch. I need the AUR for certain applications, and the high degree of customizability and opportunity for learning appeal to me as a relatively new-ish Linux user (going on a few years now, most of that time having been on Arch).

For system files/configuration on my machines, timeshift set to run once a week.

For family photos and shared files, I built a pair of SFTP servers made from old HP thin-client PCs at two different geographic locations which automatically sync to each other once a day via cron job using vsftpd and lftp. Each one has both an NVMe and SATA SSD which run in a software RAID 1 configuration.

For any other files, a second local server also using vsftpd and two SSDs in USB enclosures. I manually back them up using rsync on an irregular basis.

No problem! Yeah, as long as you have the space, I think this would be a good way to repurpose an old junker PC. I imagine a quick search of something along the lines of "how to configure a samba server" should bring up some decent tutorials.

I use an older HP thin client PC with a 4TB solid state drive as an SFTP file server using vsftpd, but if you are local only then an SMB server using samba would probably be fine. I use SFTP because I wanted something a bit more secure which I can port-forward with my router on a random higher-numbered port for remote access.

I mostly taught myself how to do this by looking at guides originally meant for the raspberry pi, but there is nothing different about running these same programs on Debian or the like. Personally, I would not recommend a raspbery pi for a large file server, as they do not natively support SSDs without additional hardware which will make the price significantly higher and less self-contained than a used, older-gen thin-client PC which can be had for relatively low cost on places like ebay (though they do make some fairly high capacity micro SD cards these days).

Hardware-wise, generally these types of servers are not CPU intensive, nor do they require any particularly high amount of RAM, so an older-gen or lower power CPU can often work fine, but you should probably make sure to get something with at least gigabit ethernet speeds, as a 100Mbit connection on, say, a raspberry pi 3 or older will be very slow for transferring large files.

I would say a used Dell or HP business laptop would be a safe bet. Most business laptops have decent keyboards, replacement batteries will be relatively easy to find, and user-serviceable RAM is the norm. Given the not especially high processing power needs, probably the middle-specced ones with a few gens-old i5 will be dirt cheap and work fine for your needs.

I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.

Arch w/ KDE gamer here. I have generally had a good experience with it. I think everything you said is generally accurate. In terms of customization, lack of bloat, and a good wiki, Arch is generally considered to be all of those things. A rolling distro like Arch I believe will also be getting the latest proton updates, which may help with sooner game compatibility/optimization updates on more recent releases.

I say go for it.

Yes, but my larger point is that you are doing the same thing, but in the negative. You are taking your specific problems and then putting forward the conclusion that they are the reasons why "regular" Linux users should not use Linux, as though these were universal problems. I am saying that I do not have those issues and that they are far from universal.

Yes, the modular nature of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. There is legitimate debate to be had on that. But that is not how your post frames the issue.

As stated above, not all of these things are even Linux problems. I would say that if iOS refuses to play nice with Linux but every other ecosystem works fine, the blame lies with Apple, not with Linux. It is not Linux's job to fix the interoperability problems of other ecosystems. The GNOME problems are related to a specific subset of Linux users, and even before today I would have said that I would not recommend GNOME to new users because of how nonstandard it can be.

I am looking through these issues and I cannot say that I can relate on almost any of these. Sorry to hear you have been having so many issues!

I do plenty of gaming and cannot think of a time where I have had GPU driver issues (despite the fact that I have Nvidia graphics on 3 out of 4 of my systems, which is supposedly more problematic).

My bluetooth works fine, and it has been literally years since an update broke something, bluetooth or otherwise (which I cannot say the same for Windows on my work computer).

I use KDE connect, SFTP, and SMB servers and I have never had any issues transferring files between Windows, Android, and Linux. What do you mean about that? (seeing other replies, it sounds like you are using iOS. That sounds like that may be an Apple problem and not a Linux problem, because Apple tend to be terrible about playing nice with other ecosystems)

The scaling is the one point I can sort of relate on. I think there is still some work to be done regarding DPI and scaling on Linux, but it's not enough of an issue to make me want to switch operating systems.

As for GNOME issues and window decorations, that sounds like a GNOME problem. GNOME does things very differently to all of the other DEs and forces programs to manually define their own window decorations rather than allowing standard default icons like other DEs, so my understanding is that GNOME in particular tends to be a source of constant headaches for Linux developers.

And I'm not some sysadmin or CS major. If I have a problem, I do a web search. If I can't find it there, I make a forum thread. I don't post a rant saying that Linux is a bad OS, lol.