I agree with some of your points. As I straddle the divide between desperately hanging onto whatever shreds of youth I can still aspire to hold, and going full-on embittered old man, I'm increasingly convinced that the best thing for this planet is humankind being uniquely fizzled out by aliens and cats rising up in three million years to rule the new world.

I have a habit of making old gear last a long time. I'm only now in the process of decommissioning an old Pentium IV 3.0GHz 64-bit with a maxed-out 2Gb of RAM, and I'm sitting here staring at a Betamax recorder in front of my keyboard, alas it hasn't worked for years and maybe never will again. My current main machine is a Clevo 'Infinity Book' equivalent with a lovely navigation key layout, from another now-bankrupt Linux vendor, hooked up to a bigger monitor because middle-aged eyes. Bought nearly new a few years ago and until recently silent, but now starting to spin the fan up from time to time as software becomes ever more resource greedy. As it was secondhand it came with the maximum 32Gb of RAM which I would never have chosen myself as I use nowhere near that in my daily computing. Despite running Firefox with about a hundred open tabs, Thunderbird and Dolphin permanently, plus Clementine, Gwenview, often something in Dragon Player and various other utilities, I rarely push more than about 8Gb. I can't believe the other day I was reading a forum where Linux users were all chiming in saying how 32Gb is the absolute minimum they can manage with and nothing less today would be acceptable. I can understand for developers or high-end gamers but these seemed a mix of different folks all wanting to outdo each other with their stupendous needs and I thought 'what planet are you on?' Ah yes, the burning planet.

Yeah, *hate* thin and/or hidden scrollbars too. Fortunately the Plasma Breeze theme has reverted to more easily visible ones, but Firefox/Thunderbird and other apps still have the awful useless variety. It's like some cultishly obsessive designer-developers are frantically trying to remove every last thing they can on the screen until they're left with what they perceive as some pure zen-like blankness, at the expense of any practicality whatsoever.

I'll throw another name into the hat you might want to keep in consideration for your next notebook. Star Labs have/had a light fanless laptop, the
Star Lite
but it's not available to order currently. I'm not sure if they're bringing out a newer version and whether that will also be fanless. They only have four products featured on their site. But I've just made my own order through them, for their 'Byte' Mk II mini PC. Like all their products, they seem to have limited batches and limited order windows, with often quite a long wait for production and delivery. I can't vouch for them yet, it could turn out to be a star purchase or a black hole, will have to wait and see.

I was looking around for a new silent mini PC for doing basic music production (simple sequencing and audio tracks, no giant DAWs or VSTs, I already have real hardware music equipement instead). So I didn't have huge spec requirements. Slimbook also do a fanless mini PC, the 'Zero', but the specs on that seem just a bit too dated, with 8th gen Intel CPU. Tuxedo have one mini PC but with a fan that apparently makes 'swoosh' noises. That's too much for this use case. (And if I'm being snidey, whilst they seem like a good Linux vendor in many ways, I was a bit pissed off that during the recent KDE sprint or whatever it was that was held at their offices, it was their influence that seems to have invoked a couple of the worst decisions I've seen in Plasma-land in a long while, the main culprit being reverting to double-click as a default. I know it can be changed back again simply enough, but after twenty years of using KDE/Plasma in which I've freed myself from the shackles of other operating systems and their tedious routines and requirements, I've always appreciated how KDE has presented such a well thought through alternative. The selection mechanism in single-click mode in Dolphin/Gwenview is so elegant and effective, it only requires retraining the brain for a few hours of use to never look back. They even implemented a second alternative 'selection mode' for people who can deal with single-click generally but can't get to grips with single-click selection. And now, decades on we all have to regress to tired old bullshit RSI-inducing anachronisms from a bygone age just to satisfy Johnny Stodge Bollocks and his beloved double-click nonsense. So thanks Tuxedo, I ordered elsewhere :)

Anyway, there's some other Linux vendors, some US-based which isn't great in my case for European import costs (Star Labs did add import costs but it was only a few euros - they seem to deliver worldwide), and others not really Linux-specific but will offer their products without an OS. I've ordered from Quiet PC in the UK before, they're pretty good and they will subtract a substantial amount from the total if you remove Windows from the deal, but they're still primarily geared towards the Windows-centric merry-go-round.

This Byte II, like other Star Labs products, offers Coreboot and updates via LVFS, with a do-what-you-like warranty. Some users have complained about the delivery delays, though it seems Covid and the worldwide parts shortages were mostly to blame. The processor is the latest Intel generation but an N200 running at between 1GHz and 3.7GHz. It only has E cores but consequently has low power consumption and hence no need for a fan. It only takes a max 16Gb RAM; should be enough for me. The rest of the specs are fairly low end in the current marketplace. I think much of what appeals to me is just that they're doing many things a bit different, providing an alternative.

Anyway, I've just typed a bigger reply than your post. Good luck and good night!