I kinda wish I had a commodity desktop box to stick Linux Mint on. Whenever I come downstairs and grab the Mint Air, I like how disinterested I am in doing anything to it now that it is working fine. I’ve got Firefox, the terminal app and Emacs in the dock (or whatever the nomenclature is) and it’s just generally crisp, agreeable, and simple. I am positive I could completely goop it up – I spent years making a living reviewing Linux desktops – but the years and temperamental changes have rendered me a lot less interested in those sorts of shenanigans.
The machine is vaguely mysterious to me, and perhaps menacing. When I searched around to understand things like “what if I tried to just convert this thing from Cinnamon to MATE or XFCE,” one thing I learned has simply not changed in a solid 18 or 19 years is that one does not simply install a new DE’s metapackage and get on with one’s day. Top reddit minds recommend a complete reinstall. If I were on top of my game, ~/me would be in its own partition, and I’d just go do that. I am not on top of my game and I’m not about to bother.
So this machine and I exist in a state of truce. I use it for three or four things, I don’t get frisky, and it just does its thing and it doesn’t get frisky.
My mind briefly turned to sticking Parallels on the Mac Studio and then running something in a VM, but there are only a few ARM distros and none of them get stellar reviews. I did install Ubuntu for ARM and it was fine but impure for my purposes. And there’d be no real point. I would end up squishing and squeezing things around until it acted more or less like macOS, I’d just be trading away some amount of performance for the dubious benefit of … what? I don’t know. It’s just not anything that matters to me that much anymore. Mouse, keyboard, windows, copy, cut, paste, end of row, beginning of row, click, zoom, close, etc.