Would love to know more, maybe some pointers to tools/utils for getting these more difficult games going. I haven’t had the time to go further than using Steam and Lutris, which covers most of what I play, but would be good to have more options.

Do not use Ubuntu. It is becoming nearly unusable due to this stuff. Fedora or Debian or whatever else.

They also defaulted to sending searches through Amazon a few years ago.

You can't run whatever you want.

e.g. I used to install qlplugins on every new macos device as our company bought them. Then one day Apple refused to run any 32-bit library despite the fact that 32 bit code still runs natively on x86-64 chips (this when everything still ran on x86-64 btw).

Designers still ask me: "Hey, how do I see the dimensions of this picture when pressing spacebar to preview it?" And I have to say: "Sorry, Apple said you can't do that anymore".

Although I probably have my price, I too otherwise refuse to work for companies that'd force me to use windows. I've been lucky to be able to use macs since 2008 and some of those companies had linux users. Most top tech companies will happily give you a choice between a mac or windows. For me it has generally mean I don't work for banks, the government, or very large organizations that aren't recent tech companies.

That being said, at a certain scale or type of company centralized management, software support, and security risks mean "allowing" random people to run their own OS becomes difficult and risky. Lots of large older companies probably have proprietary software, too (thankfully more of this is becoming web based).

Yes, in theory linux is more secure and anybody who would want to use it is probably capable of taking care of themselves, but it is probably (at large companies) corporate lawyers and CISOs ruining the fun. And linux can have its own risks and dedicating a team to support (from a security perspective) them isn't economical for the what would be very small user base. Ye old big bank can't and arguably shouldn't allow it without an otherwise good reason.

I admire this spirit, probably because I am still unable to put it in practice -- and those are typically moments where I dream of my own business. IT at my current employer is capable enough ( though there are rumblings of moving everything, but hardware offshore again.. I am starting to think it all moves in waves ), but our executives, well, lets just say over the past few weeks I was questioning what I am doing here.

I'm a dev who switched from desktop Linux to Windows with WSL without regrets.

That devs at a company use Windows doesn't mean they're forced to. Often it just means the designers also work on Windows.

Surface Pro: missing support for MIPI cameras

Z13: until very recently, BIOS bug that made Linux not recognize the sound chip

I've been using a Linux desktop workstation for like a decade. Never got on the laptop revolution, don't really understand it, seems like you're just setting yourself up for some savage RSI.

Apple Silicon means no discrete graphics card and no CUDA, no DirectX. It seems fine for machine learning, it falls short for other intensive applications.

Apple Silicon has the power envelope advantage, Intel and AMD chips remain faster for those who can deal with the power consumption (under lock when longer battery is really needed, and either be plugged or have a backup battery when going full throttle)

On Linux there's FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3d and OpenSCAD in (subjective) decending order of capability. FreeCAD still suffers from the "topological naming problem", though there's a fork that helps with that and merging it upstream is an ongoing process.

I purchased Alibre Atom3d because it was the only non-subscription affordable package I could find, but it's quite disappointing and won't run in wine anyway due to the licensing rootkit it uses. So I end up using one of the above linux capable tools, depending on the needs of the model. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses and none is satisfying overall. I reach for OnShape for any design that is going to be open source, because it is a pleasure to use (even though it is web-based), but I don't make enough money from CAD to pay for a $1500 annual subscription.

Not CAD. None of the Linux options are on the level of SolidWorks etc.

OnShape works well enough for most hobbyist uses of CAD, and runs fine on Linux. It’s quite a bit better than 360 IMO.

Like some other good-bones free software, the UI is terrible. I challenge anyone who has prior CAD experience, but no FreeCAD experience, to install the software and design a simple bracket in under an hour.

I tried Fusion under Wine and it didn't really work. I haven't tried NX or Solidworks in the last few years.