I am a father of young children. Prior to my deck, I would be just too tired by the time the kids were asleep to go downstairs in my basement and play on my desktop. That just led to me playing games maybe once a week on the weekend.
Now that I have a deck, I can kick my feet up on the couch and play for an hour or two before bed.
Because of the deck I actually am able to make time to play games. Without the deck I just skip games altogether during the week.
I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn't work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn't work.
We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.
After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading.
(I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)
Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.
From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.
The T series is probably my favorite. Currently I am running a P52 I got for free that was a recycle. A little big, but plenty of performance. Prior to this one I had a T460s with the i5 I got for free, it was just missing one of the two internal batteries and had a couple screen imperfections. Maybe in a year or two I will get lucky and get another T series.
I usually look for corporate office liquidations in the paper or on social media. Other than that, I stop into colleges and businesses and ask them if they have hardware they need to recycle. Companies usually pay for recycling, so sometimes they will just give you stuff to lower their recycling cost.
I usually grab a 3-4 year old Thinkpad every year or so for anywhere from free to 300 bucks. I pick them up from old corporate liquidation lots. Usually grab one that is a little dirty or beat up and then just clean it up and install my own SSD and upgrade ram from my stockpile.
I like some of the others on that list, but with how cheaply and easily I can get a Thinkpad, I just can't be bothered to spend more. I use my laptop mainly for code, and I do a lot of low-level programming so performance is usually way more than enough. The programs I write are extremely small and very efficient. Any processor from the last 20+ years will run what I am usually working on.
When I want to spend big bucks on a computer, I put that money towards my desktop where I do more gaming and some digital artwork.
I have both. I had the switch long before the steam deck was available. I will say that I have not touched my switch to play games since I received the deck. I got my deck in the second big batch of deliveries when it first released, so I have had it for more than year at this point.
When I want to play Nintendo exclusives, I purchase them and then use my switch rip them to play using yuzu on my deck.
I wish I had an answer for you, but it was never heavy to me. I was actually surprised how easy it was to hold considering the size. Granted, I am a large man (6'6", 230lbs) so maybe that has something to do with it.
I know a handful of languages and I think of them as tools. For example, a flathead screwdriver will work on a phillips screw head (In most cases with some outliers), but a phillips screwdriver might just be better for the job. Same with a wrench and a socket with a ratchet, etc.
When it comes to programming or scripting I approach it in the same way. If I am at work, and I need to automate something quick and dirty, no end user will need to use it, and it is just adjusting data or spitting data back at me, I am probably going to write it in Python.
Or, if I need to make something that an end user is going to interact with, I am probably going to spin up a web server and use the MERN stack to create that.
If I am working at home on a TUI for my favorite application, I am going to use Rust or Python
And if I working on a project that requires me to work with embedded systems, I am probably going to reach for C, maybe C++ depending on the support, and I have in a couple of instances needed to use Assembly.
All this to say, I think that if I had to use Python for all of these, I would be in trouble. Same as if I had to use C++ to accomplish all of the above. Could it be done? Sure. Do I want to do that? Not at all.
I agree with this. I use Linux exclusively at home, but for work I have a windows laptop. It’s really not that bad. I for sure don’t like it as much, but it isn’t atrocious.
This is one of my favorite GBA games. The controls are so good.