Nebula fucks, I had been putting off the lifetime sub for ages and finally bit the bullet one day and I’ve been using it more than YouTube. Feels good knowing the creators get more stake in it and are literal stakeholders without all the alrogithm nonsense.

They’ve made it seem like the lifetime sub won’t be around forever though, worth noting.

Yes SSD and RAM are simple to replace. There are two SSD NVME slots in fact, and only one is used by default so you can add another.

Dell XPS 13 checks all your boxes except good speakers.

I have the XPS 15 9510 model. Intel 13th gen i7, backlit keyboard, great trackpad, sleek design. It came with 16GB ram but I replaced with 32.

I bought it “refurb” on eBay last May SPECIFICALLY because I wanted the most Mac-like PC. Running Arch Linux from day one and it’s been rock solid and super fast. The speakers aren’t great and the mic is pretty bad. But I usually use headphones or external speakers when docked.

I honestly am very happy with it and it was only like $550.

I spent a bunch of time before this comparing new computers; between Thinkbooks, Framework, Tuxedo, XPS. In the end I decided what I wanted didn’t require it to be new. I was only concerned about degraded battery but I can replace that myself when the time comes.

I don’t want to plug the seller but they’re constantly selling these on eBay so you’ll probably see them if you search.

Side note I disabled the NVIDIA GPU and only use the Intel iGPU which has saved a lot of battery.

VNC is sloooooow and RDP is actually usable since it renders with vectors.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills whenever I see people talking about running any Linux distro on a Mac. Every time I try it’s a bad time with driver support. And yes I used t2linux, most recently with Ubuntu. It came with nonfunctional sleep mode (apparently a problem since Sonoma), a very buggy Bluetooth controller and a very janky feeling cursor movement with the trackpad. Also my mic volume was super low on Zoom calls.

What am I missing?

OSS software gets abandoned way more often than acquired proprietary stuff.