I used Krita for the first time the other day and it was a lot more slick than Gimp. Not a professional though, just got a hobbyist interest in graphic design.

It uses the gentoo package manager as part of it’s bootstrapping process when new versions of it are being built but the final product doesn’t have any gentoo functionality

Not sure why people are downvoting you. It’s a simple enough task that the risk of LLM hallucination is very low.

Suspect it is just from people who dislike AI but in my experience using it as a replacement search engine for some stackoverflow type questions is about the only useful thing I’ve gotten it to do.

I’d recommend getting to grips with the fundamentals of python or JavaScript first before jumping in but Godot is a great open source tool for picking up some gamedev after you are used to the basics.

To flex on strangers online and post to unixporn fora

Shh we’re trying to circlejerk here! Keep your voice of reason down and grab some lotion

I tend to put work dir under documents but yeah would be the same having a dev or local dir for code.

Does seem like being funny helps with running for president these days

These people should be hung, drawn and quartered

Alpine package manager and use of MUSL over glibc are pretty similar to a BSD. Like others have pointed out there are limits to how closely a Linux distro can match the deliberate structure of those distros given the different design philosophy

OpenRC works just fine for me

Dinosaurs would be fun, and would accurately portray canonical

There are a few projects like lima and crossroads (not sure about name, might be crossover) by canonical which create a new user in /home and runs ubuntu “natively” on M series chips.

I’d be tempted to stick with macOS and get an M3, then run linux in a VM with QEMU or whatever. Given your focus on ergonomics I don’t see any other hardware that will match your expectations.

Refurb models come with i5 processor at 3.5Ghz and 4GB RAM but has another slot you can put another chip into (or replace both with 8GB RAM chips). The processor is also replaceable so you could hit a higher clock speed. Everything in a thinkpad is modular including the screen so you can pretty much do what you want with it.

Edit: Yeah, tbf I skimmed over your spec list. Not sure why the apple hardware or the CPU generation is important, especially for the latter where the clock speed is what really matters. Could probably put 16GB RAM in each slot.

Edit2: X1 Carbon or something from that series would probably match the lightweight requirement although they are less modular. No replacing the CPU.

Thinkpad T420

It does get better with some of the more advanced distros. Perversely they are easier to run and maintain. The beginner distros try to hide the complexity to make everything more user friendly but these abstractions can be more confusing than the fundamentals they are hiding.

However there’s nothing people online can do if you don’t find linux interesting enough to do a deep dive on it.

Depends how much time you spend in the terminal but if you spend a lot of time there then it can just about replace a tiling VM with a maximised terminal screen. Has full functionality to add workspaces, sessions and split windows horizontally/vertically.

I partially get around the loss of my tiling WMs on my work PC (macbook) by leaning heavily into tmux. I know there are MacOS tiling managers like spectacles but I prefer using applications that are multiplatform so I have “transferable skills”.

I use XFCE when not on tiling WMs