For me the most interesting distros are vanilla binary rolling-release ones, which ship all stuff from upstream unchanged. I love Arch, but Slackware and a few others are interesting too.
These make it easy to set up a simple system with few moving parts, which is fast and doesn't break. I just a tiling window manager (xmonad), a terminal (urxvt), a browser (firefox with vimperator) and emacs.
And Nix-style ones, NixOS and GuixSD, are the future. Declarative system configuration and package definitions. Non-destructive changes.
In terms of laptops, I'm really fond of Xiaomi Air 12 M3. Fanless, really good quality, cheap and all stock Intel components. So it just works.
These make it easy to set up a simple system with few moving parts, which is fast and doesn't break. I just a tiling window manager (xmonad), a terminal (urxvt), a browser (firefox with vimperator) and emacs.
And Nix-style ones, NixOS and GuixSD, are the future. Declarative system configuration and package definitions. Non-destructive changes.
In terms of laptops, I'm really fond of Xiaomi Air 12 M3. Fanless, really good quality, cheap and all stock Intel components. So it just works.