jq, or if I need to do something wacky a one-off python script.

The OS on the Steam Deck is Arch based, just like Manjaro, so I imagine it’ll do games.

I’m a fullstack developer as well, and use Arch as my daily driver, and have for the past 9 years. While I can’t speak for Manjaro directly, just the upstream, I have some coworkers that use it without issue. I think it’d be fine for your needs, at least worth trying out. I hear a lot of bleeding edge horror stories thrown around but in that 9 years 95% of problems were of my own doing, and the 5% were easily fixed with a rollback of a package. Out of that, my downtime isn’t worth mentioning it’s so negligible. I feel my coworkers on macos have more issues with major version upgrades by far.

On Arch-based distros, pkgbuild is a great way to handle custom packages when needed, and the AUR is gives me almost everything I need that isn’t in the official repos. It’s a great developer environment.

I’m very interested in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as well, was thinking of trying it out as my next distro on a personal machine to try out something new since I’ve been on a single distro for so long, but not because I need anything new, just sounds like fun.

I have left arch installs un-updated for months and had them be fine. I did leave one for a year once and the update hosed it, but it was still recoverable and runs fine to this day.

so, I wouldn’t worry much about the “update every week” thing. even on my daily driver I forget for a month sometimes.

I feel like this is the answer. if you’ve ever had to maintain a build pipeline or repository for .deb or .rpm, it’s not exactly pleasant (it is extremely robust, however). arch packaging is very simple by comparison, and I really doubt they’d need much more.

it’s easy to recommend a ThinkPad for Linux, and something in the T or P series laptops might suit you. video editing is a potential difficulty though, as that feels a little more workstation-grade than the rest, and you’ll probably want to go big on RAM (32GB would be best) and be sure to get at least an intel i7. I’ve not had great luck with battery life on AMD (shame because everything else is great) but perhaps others have tips for doing better.

you could also go for the ThinkPad yoga models (make sure they’re still ThinkPad though! they also sell a different model line just called “yoga”) if you wanted a tablet/convertible for graphics work.

anyway look at the T14, P14s, or P16 if you want something bigger. whatever the latest generation of those models is.

these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they’ve been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:

• ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I’m worried about long-term availability of replacements
• can’t do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don’t want Bluetooth latency
• they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you’re on a Skype call from 2003

so they are good but don’t solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I’m just doing meetings and listening to music.

yes, I’m using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I’d come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.

fwiw I’ve been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I’ve had to think “oh, I’m on Wayland” are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don’t run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I’ve been very happy especially over the last year or so.

I do not use asahi though so I can’t comment on that specifically.