Maybe one of the Fedora Atomic distros would be up your alley? https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

I don’t think NixOS meets the bill. You’d be learning and troubleshooting a whole new language just to setup your system and modify the core configuration.

How did you manage to convince them?

I think btrfs ticks all your boxes. I would suggest yabsnap for snapshots. Then if you want a backup off-disk use borg or btrfs has a way to transmit (sync) to a remote. Yabsnap has a command which will make a script to restore from backup, which you can review and run.

I have a Canon MX340 (maybe pixma?) that works with gutenprint. The ADF is a bit messed up but it otherwise works as intended. If you have a similar model, it will probably be supported.

I have DS4 working in Arch with Wine. As someone else mentioned, the hid-playstation kmod just worked out of the box. The key for some games to work properly was to add a SDL2 gamepad mapping.

Also see section 3.10 here which may be relevant: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamepad

I believe you can set dolphin to be like this. I have it so I can either double click to go into a folder, or expand it for the tree view.

Both the T14s and X1 Carbon would be good options. I also have an x390 which I quite like.

I don’t know how steamos works, but if it’s arch-based, can you just do pacman -Syu to update?

kitty, nvim, fish, zed, mpv, btop, borg. Weird how all the gone ones have short names. Depending on the system, I would add tlp as well.

For my desktop, I have two disks. One is root, one is home. They are single BTRFS filesystems with automated snapshots, compressions, and a few subvolumes. Works great.

For a laptop, similar but with only a single disk/partition and FDE. Also works well.

Arch on desktop/laptop because I’m very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.

Debian on servers because it’s stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.

Same as OP, but I’m not likely to change them out. I’ve tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.

There is not, but I will add one.

You could get started with Qt, specifically the legacy widgets. There are bindings for Python available (pyside or pyqt) if you don’t want to learn C++ or another language right away. You can also port your GUI definitions to other languages at a later date.

MS and other corps love MIT and related licenses because they can just take the code and basically do whatever with it in their projects, so it makes sense for them to promote it. Generally speaking, they won’t touch GPL/AGPL as it would force them to distribute their source.

I believe it was a very intentional choice to use a permissive license for Rust. If they hadn’t, it would not have been as popular as it is today, nor would it have big money behind it. https://rustfoundation.org/members

This is basically the holy grail for finding how to do things or troubleshooting once you have the basics down: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

A large amount of information is transferrable to other distros, particularly if they use systemd.

I would also spend some time getting comfortable with the command line. There are a million tutorials, guides, and free courses on this topic. Find a shell and terminal emulator you like. I’m using Fish and Kitty these days.

Going against the grain, maybe consider EndeavourOS for a distro? https://endeavouros.com/

In this scenario, the thumbnails are going to be generated when you browse the directory. Probably what network filesystem you’re using. Alternately, maybe there is a maximum file size on previews? I know dolphin has that option.

I would use the native version. For something like this, it makes sense that it should have less restricted/sandboxed access to the underlying system.

I think an open-source general device benchmark would be cool. Including CPU / GPU / Battery life metrics. As far as I know, everything that does this is proprietary.