The quality was one of the major reasons I choose this laptop. I think that in some laptops Dell and other brands have come close to getting that feeling, but comparatively they just feel a little cheaper on the average. I looked at MacBook's for a while for this reason too, they got some good hardware too but really depends on what you'll be doing with it. I don't see myself programming on a MacBook the way that I want to.
I see where you're coming from, I don't like advertising and in order for Lemmy to really get as big as Reddit it would probably need a more robust monetization model eventually. I don't care to pay for good services as long as they are useful and don't steal my data. However since it didn't start like that it's never going to work out, many people won't go for that.
A while ago I thought the same thing about Apple and then I realized that it's just really easy comparatively. But yeah I'm doing something similar going into computer science. Depends on what surface you get, I got a refurbished Surface Book 3 on Amazon which is always a gamble but it was significantly cheaper, mine looked and felt completely new when I got it. Been holding up well so far.
Been using NixOS for a couple months. It’s gotten easier to configure and change because of it, and new computers are super easy to setup because I can just change/apply the config and system wide changes will apply with one command!
I think that Lemmy has the opportunity to replace Reddit, time will tell how far this can really go. Just weeks ago, posts on here were only getting hundreds of upvotes. However, now I'm seeing multiple posts hit thousands a day on lemmy.world. There are many improvements to make until then, some UI, and UX improvements. I know that many people still have trouble understanding the concepts of federation so until those can be resolved I still think that it's not going to reach that level of accessibility. I think we all know how Reddit failed here and lost many users.
Top 4 (couldn't think of 5)
Password managers are a requirement for me these days. With how many breaches occur daily that we might not even know about you probably want a password that hasn't been reversed or used before. For me I don't know what I'd do without Bitwarden. I previously used LastPass until they added some restrictions and I figured out that Bitwarden was opensource. I don't currently run my own instance of it but easily could, keeping my passwords off other peoples computers.