Welp, here I am, reminiscing over my old choices of Linux stuff.
Before anyone starts wondering what kind of shit I use my T470 for, I shall be listing what I use it for, sorted by importance from the highest priority.
To me, fixed releases & rolling releases don't matter that much as long as I can readily reproduce my computing environment with as little difficulty as possible. That said, I do have some things I could say for either.
Starting with fixed release :
And the rolling release :
For the distro, Artix is the only distro I can say I would use. That said, most Linux distros don't matter to me.
At first (with the Dell 5485 still in my hold), I went for Linux Mint (with Cinnamon DE), as my first dive to Linux. And stuff mostly worked there... except for the touchscreen. Sure, touch input is recognized, but at that time, the cursor didn't disappear (I dunno, Cinnamon issues at that time?). And so begins my misguided distrohopping into various other distros until I crashed into Manjaro.
As for my experiences with Linux Mint, I didn't really use it all that much aside from occasionally livebooting it to fuck around with some system files.
So begins my first foray into Arch‐based distros and my experiences with various DEs and their (mostly similar) interactions with the touchscreen. And, well... as far as I knew at that time, only Gnome 3 hid the cursor, which led to me falsely thinking the 5485's touchscreen fully works at that time. That said, my desktophopping (it's like distrohopping except it was the DE that changed instead of the entire distro) did come from the minimal Manjaro installation and I eventually gained enough experience to hop straight to Arch. Granted, I had the advantage of having an additional screen & 2 guides (one less verbose & more to‐the‐point than ArchWiki) to do so.
Looking back, I think I made the right move jumping off Manjaro, considering better alternatives exist even within its own niche of providing a more beginner‐friendly Arch‐based distro (Artix counts as one of them too) and Philip Muller is driving Manjaro to the ground.
And we're at the final stop (would be final had Arch not stuck to SystemD, but we'll get to that). With Arch... nothing much changed, except I eventually learned to install Arch (and Artix later on) using just the default documentation (ArchWiki or Artix Wiki depending on which Arch distro I'm on).
As for the touchscreen? Welp, that thing actually wasn't as "functional" as I thought. Even with Gnome 3 (and various touchscreen setups), only one finger was recognized, which nuked my chances at properly playing PPSSPP on my 5485 with the touchscreen (which is something I LIKED to do at that time, and I mostly play Gran Turismo PSP on my G710EAW nowadays). And so, the 5485 was returned to Windows 10, where it would eventually die. That said, at that time (somewhere around 2021‐2022 I suppose?), I also started following Luke Smith, leading to me getting a Thinkpad X220 (which has since been sold by the time I wrote this, that laptop is SHIT) and diving to Artix from there.
I (and Luke Smith as well btw) also forgot to mention that Arch Linux (and the AUR by extension) does not separate proprietary software from the rest of their repos. For example, Arch extra contains Discord & Vivaldi; with multilib having Steam. As for AUR... I dunno. I think Chrome & Spotify topped the list but there are more I'm not aware of. But then again those can be easily avoided so it isn't that much of an issue.
And here we are, at the current final stop that is Artix. With the insanity of systemd, it is only inevitable that Artix would soon become the only distro I would use (sure we have other non‐systemd distros like Alpine, Chimera, Gentoo, and Void). And I did stick with Artix (and eventually made an installation guide worded as reinstallation), which says something about what the devs were doing.
That said, not all is perfect in Artix.
Speaking of the lack of nonfree separation, Artix is also guilty of keeping Steam around in lib32.
Actually, I don't think I can be sure of what's next, so I guess here's a list of what I might look forward to next.
The init system everyone inevitably starts with whenever they run into Linux because most known distros stick with it. Though I personally do not have much to say as I do not interact with SystemD that much (except in Arch but I didn't really pay attention aside from the necessary parts for getting Arch running).
That said, SystemD worsened nowadays, as Poettering added age tracking and made sure it stuck. In addition to the crazy shit surrounding SystemD (which I will not bore you with), I do not justify having that crap up my systems.
For the first time I'm on Artix, I went with runit as I was following Luke Smith at that time. That said, I didn't like runit's services commands (which I felt was not as familiar as SystemD at that time), so I eventually switched to OpenRC. I also found out runit is the largest init (in terms of file size) for Artix so there's that as well.
After runit, I switched to OpenRC (and stuck with it for the longest). I found OpenRC to be the most convenient option, giving me something reminiscent of systemd's more familiar commands on services. And I ran it for what I think was 2 years, giving me confidence to continue running OpenRC... at least until one elogind update (along with some self‐inflicted injuries) fucked everything up & forced me to play with some other init.
That said, with OpenRC now supporting user services, I may try it out if I went for Parabola.
As of the year I wrote this, I switched to dinit (with some haste from being forced to switch by OpenRC breaking & not having the time to try out s6 before I finalized my options). Initially, I'm a bit on the fence with dinit, since it was forced on me by elogind (base). The different commands for enabling services depending on conditions (as user, as root, or in chroot) threw me off for a bit (though I did manage to get used to 2 out of 3 conditions). And what really threw me off my rocker (at least for the first times) was dinitctl starting the service as it got put into autostart, which got me stuck in LXDM as I started it before properly configuring it, requiring me to ctrl+alt+f2 back to the terminal & configure stuff.
Setting aside those speedbumps, I can only say that I will stick with Dinit for as long as I stick to Artix, and the odds of me switching to any other init (aside from SystemD) will depend on me switching from Artix in the first place. After all, if it wasn't for dinit I wouldn't have Pipewire running.
As for X11 / Wayland, I have nothing to add aside from being in X11 because XFCE still relies on it (AFAIK, though XFCE seems to be working on Wayland support). That said, Dedoimedo made a better argument from an end user's perspective and also solidified my switching to XLibre over Xorg.
Mostly because I cannot be bothered to learn newer DEs.
Not sure. Personally, my reservations against qt mainly lies in keeping my systems running on one type of toolkit.