Well, it’s not just Arch with preconfigured Hyprland, it also has a lot of bloatware by default.

It’s also not supported by advertising, instead focusing on developing a premium, subscription-based experience for power users.

That and VC, apparently.

Reading the arch wiki (a great resource regardless of your distro) suggests this is a bug (though where, it does not say). The easiest “fix” would probably be a systemd unit that does echo "LID" > /proc/acpi/wakeup on boot, as suggested in the linked troubleshooting.

I have had that working on Hyprland, using shift+volume to change microphone volume. First, obviously, make sure that your keyboard returns XF86AudioPause (not, e.g. XF86AudioPlayPause). Next, try having that key combination execute a command you know works (launch a browser or some such). If none of those work, I’m out of ideas.

Not quite sure what that would do, maybe I’m misunderstanding you, that seems to just type the angle brackets that are on the layout in Windows mode and nothing in Mac mode

Maybe that’s a keyboard layout thing that only works with the UK layout then. If I hit AltGr+[ – maybe I’m misremembering, it could be ] – then e.g. a, (using a UK layout) I get ä.

As a backup, when Fedora updates to Plasma 6.7 (probably with Fedora 45) you’ll have the option of long-pressing keys to get a small alternative letter-popup, which of course still adds a keypress so probably also suboptimal.

Several possibilities:

1. As I read the manual Fn+X+F is this keyboard’s equivalent of Fn lock, maybe try that.
2. I believe that AltGr+[ should allow you to type umlauts (at least that works on the GB layout), but I don’t know if that will work on mac mode (I have never used a mac keyboard).
3. Alternatively, you could map the compose key to the print screen key (or some other option you wouldn’t mind losing) and then use that (umlauts should be composed using colon+letter, as far as I recall).

I have no opinion on that one way or the other, I was only adding context.

Probably referring to the “vandalism” comments that were added to PKGBUILDs as the supply chain attack was being handled. Those were, I believe, in Russian.

Probably, looks like something that phone autocorrect would mess up.

Depends what comes of the sinking/implosion. Titanic gave us SOLAS, Titan as far as I know gave us some dead millionaires.

It’s not impossible that something useful could be left in the ML flotsam.

I guess that makes the “suicide” part easier to achieve.

Worth mentioning that the fix was merged into 6.19.12 (and 7.0; probably also the LTSs, but I didn’t bother to check those).

AI is only opt-in

Not to take anything away from your overall point, which I completely agree with, but this may be a bit of a stretch. All of the “AI” buttons and features are - to my knowledge - on by default. They have made it a lot easier to change that to “off by default now and in the future”, which is very welcome, but “only opt-in” is, again, a bit of a stretch.

In my experience (with a networked HP printer), both printing and scanning just work out-of-the-box with the standard Linux tools. CUPS really is great.

That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.

Thank you for distilling that.

In order to make the kernel option persist, you will have to add the option to your bootloader config. Ubuntu probably uses grub, but in any case, I never can remember how to configure any of the bootloaders. Someone here can probably help out (or it’ll be a quick search away, I’m sure).

You would have to do that, yes. In all likelihood, you’ll be fine with just picking a distro. As the Señor says, elementary has a Mac-like aesthetic.

I have no experience with that distro myself, but I’d imagine that it allows running a live environment directly from the USB, that will let you test it without installing so you can see if everything that you need to work will work, and also whether you actually like it (running a live environment from a USB will be slower than if you had it installed, so don’t base your “liking it” off of that).

Also, arch is way less intimidating than its reputation suggests; especially on a secondary PC, where you can just run off to your main PC to look at the arch wiki.

Other than that, I suppose something like AntiX would probably run not-terrible on it as well.