I agree.
A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.
Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven't bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.
I met up with a group of friends prior to a concert. She was somebody that I didn't know yet. That changed!
Ubuntu isn't my favorite, but I used xubuntu for many years. A lot of noise gets thrown around about Snaps, but from an end-user perspective they tend to work fine unless you have very low system constraints. Better than adding a half-dozen repositories that may or may not be around for long. A lot of developers work to make sure that their software runs well in Ubuntu and the LTS releases tend to be a good long-term option if you don't want any significant changes for a long time.
Even with their regular releases, I daisy-chained upgrades on an old Core2 laptop for something like seven years without any major (computer becomes a paperweight) issues. Sometimes (like with Snaps) Ubuntu insists on going its own way, which can result in errors/shitty OS things that don't pop up in other distributions. I've had to deal with some minor issues with Ubuntu over the years (broken repositories, upgrades causing hiccups, falling back to older kernels temporarily), but I think that you'll get issues like that regardless of what distro you pick.
I didn't, but only because my solution wasn't novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a 'primary' computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.
I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.
Paper printing is no big deal if you stick carefully to your first thought about linux-compatible hardware.
I use Brother laser printers whenever I need a hard copy. That brand tends to work well with linux, but research the model number in conjunction with the distribution that you're using before you purchase.
Your point about locked in software is very important. Even in my own industry, some of my earlier jobs relied on custom Windows software for billing, dictation, document creation, and more. A lot of former nonstarters have been pushed to the cloud, but there are still challenges.
I've had good luck with the BSDs over the years. Great system documentation.
I remember that Raspbian had manual overscan settings in /boot/config.txt, but I don't know how common something like that is in other distributions.
This is a good tip.
I've had to do this before when I ran in to issues with lightdm. Ctl +Alt F-Key to a tty and try the command for your window manager to make sure that your display manager isn't the culprit.
Or don't, I guess. I'm not trying to boss you around. Good luck and let us know what works for you!
Ooops! I meant to type 'Macbook Air'. I'll leave the goof up to give your comment context, but I don't have a MBP these days. I used the initial Asahi release and I've been upgrading it in place for a year or so.
In my household it differs from person to person. My preference is Trebuchet white-on-black. I don't know why, but the words just melt into my brain.
I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I'll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.