i mean, most of them are celled "display managers" -- lightDM, gDM, lxDM
spv
rust compiles to native code, so barring some horrific implementation issues, i'd bet my money on it being roughly equivalent.
you're absolutely right about that last point. my fully-spec'd t440p (4910mq, 16GB, 1080p IPS, t450p trackpad, backlit, quectel eg25-g for WWAN, the whole 9 yards) cost me less than $300 to build -- a similar machine from minifree would've cost nearly double that for worse specs. though, it should be noted, that that price gets you more than silicon -- they offer support over IRC, some sort of warranty, and i think other shit too.
in my experience, practice, practice, and more practice. but "just git gud m8" isn't really helpful advice. if you don't have half a decade on hand, i can make a few more practical recommendations.
a shell that can do argument autocomplete is your best friend. personally, i use zsh + ohmyzsh + fzf + fzf-tab, but i'm sure there are other configs, and i've heard ohmyzsh is a bit of a nightmare, though i haven't had too many issues.
so let's say you're running the one rsync command this month, and you forgot the args, just tab-tab and you can search through the arguments with fzf.
weird -- they work for me. ctrl+c sends SIGINT, and ctrl+v iirc isn't treated specially. i figured sending SIGINT with kill would then preform a copy, but it doesn't. fuck. now i have another puzzle...
is this the part where i get to smugly use i3? :P
i love backwards compatibility as much as the next guy, but at some point, if there isn't enough of a community to backport fixes, there probably aren't many using them. if a tree falls in the forest, you get the idea.