>it's that you also had to bail from high-quality, high-polish hardware from any vendor. I've seen the kinds of laptops you're talking about; they're kind of awful, miles away from the best that Apple or even Dell or Lenovo are bringing to market. But you do you.

I use an HP 830 G5, a high end 13" thin notebook from 2018. It cost me 350 bucks. I sold my M1 for 70% of what I paid, and I can replace this thing for something similar, so it makes financial sense in my case. It's just a platform, I don't really care about the thing itself. It hooks into a thunderbolt dock for a lot of it's life anyway.

>Honestly, I suspect you just like having to tinker with your stack to get work done. (I mean, I've been there - I use OrgMode.)

I run Fedora 37 (35 and 36 upgraded without issue). I'm in the process of building a new house, which requires insane amounts of paperwork and communication as well as document storage and exchange. I need this to be rock solid, running E2EE on a NextCloud VPS in combination with this workstation setup does that for me. It's a little work up front, but it's been smooth sailing ever since setup was done. It just gets out of my way; I don't care about this WM versus that, this display manager, the whole systemd discussion. Everything except the fingerprint scanner just works, no tinkering required.

>Sure, being able to swap out parts is theoretically nice, but you'll do that maybe once in the useful life of a computer -- but I haven't needed or wanted to do either in easily a decade. How often does this really come up?

You can't predict breaking your computer. I managed a pretty large fleet of Macs for a living for about 2 years; build quality is great but they're not infallible. When they do break, you're at the mercy of Apple, and I simply do not have the time to wait for their repairs. With this setup, not only can I upgrade whatever, whenever, but anything that will run Fedora and has a modest amount of local storage can replace it for at least the time being.

Compare that to the situation I was in: Any repairs that I couldn't have DIY'd probably would have cost me at least the total cost of this computer (maybe even twice over) and would have put me out of business for a few days.

>And I'm really curious about anyone's privacy needs if they abandon APPLE for roll-your-own. Yes, it's all in your hands now, but most people don't have the time or inclination to be sure they're doing all the right things, security-wise and privacy-wise, to stay safe.

Sure, but I do. I simply hate surveillance capitalism with a burning passion; I honestly think there is a logical set of steps from that to political division and a worse world to live in. So I don't want any part in it. I must admit that that sounds like philosophical grandstanding, but I promise you it's a sincere belief. It's not so much about privacy from state entities; that's a lost battle in my threat model.

If you're locked into an ecosystem that you cannot easily get out of (and there's a BUNCH of dark patterns Apple applies to try and poke you to stay as well as the obvious loss of software licenses) you're a boiling frog. I see Apple going in a worse direction incentive-wise. Nowadays, I just don't care about where they're going anymore, it's not my problem.