I was rocking a revived Thinkpad W540 which probably cost me around that price after I upgraded everything I could. The only word of caution I’ll give you if searching the used market is that older NVIDIA cards are deprecated by newer drivers on top of NVIDIA Optimus being a royal pain in the ass on Linux.

I use GNOME 43 on Debian 12. I sincerely enjoy it. The workspaces are intuitive, it looks and feels sexy, and it has a pretty great set of extensions. While I really appreciate other projects like KDE and XFCE, I think GNOME is probably the most mature DE I’ve used.

That said, I do have a few gripes. For starters, it’s pretty annoying that I have to use tweaks to access settings that should absolutely be included in the regular settings page. It’s also pretty dumb that I have to install an extension to be able to quarter tile. There are so e other small issues I have, but none more than I would have with any other desktop experience, and overall I adore what the devs have put together.

I’ve had decent success running my fg games through Bottles using the GE Wine runner with VK3D enabled. This includes newer 3D titles running at 1440p on my AMD iGPU.

My work uses a mix of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice on our machines. I doubt the latter will become an industry standard anytime soon, but I was honestly surprised to see them using it.

Since you’re experienced, I think Debian is appropriate. Rock-solid, well-supported, and comes with a decent variety of DE options. I personally rock GNOME and have Timeshift set up for rollbacks if necessary.

I lean toward the “here’s a goal, good fucking luck getting there” types of games, but I sometimes play more open-ended games like Cataclysm: DDA and Dwarf Fortress. Currently I’ve been binging Vechs’ Super Hostile Minecraft maps, which I guess offer a fusion of both?

It’s been mentioned already, but I genuinely love the WAN Show. Linus and Luke work really well together, and it’s easily become my go-to podcast during my daily walks. This is coming from someone who generally doesn’t enjoy podcasts, so maybe that means something?

The CLI is simple enough that I don’t really bug with any GUI abstractions. I used tubesync for a while on unRAID with pretty decent success, but I eventually ran into some limitations and ended switching to a cron job.

KDE developers: okay so we’re gonna switch to a floating taskbar so we look less like a Windows clone

Windows developers: hey guys I have a crazy idea

Debian 12 with GNOME. I’m boring and just want something that works. :)