Thanks, Gris and Gud! I'll take a look at System76 and some other Linux-ready options.

Does anyone have any idea why I might not be able to send email in Outlook under an email alias that I'm all set up for? This is driving me and my admin nuts.

Does anyone use Chromium? It refuses to play most videos, like anything embedded in a Twitter or Tumblr timeline. It does play YouTube. (Edit: It won't stream Pandora either.)

Searching gets me a lot of info about Linux, but since I'm not running Linux, I can't tell if/how it's applicable to me.

I do have Firefox. I use it to silo my fannish stuff from my RL stuff, and I'm trying to get away from Chrome.

I always found Chromium to feel unpolished. I have used Brave and Edge (the new Chromium version) and Opera, all based on Chromium, with better luck, Edge being my current browser of choice, though I still hit the occasional site where Chrome has magic the others don't, like [link] (for making nice printable graphs for math tests).

I was using Brave, but apparently the Brave people are kind of hinky. But trying to switch to Chromium has been enough of a pain in the ass that I may give up and go back.

Could always try Opera or one of several others. For me the killer feature is easy built in profile switching, which chrome and edge have but when I last used it Opera did not.

There's also Vivaldi. It's a pretty cool Chromium-based browser.

So Macs are going to be arm-based now. Seems like that would make it less popular for developers, but I don't know how big a market that is. For other people, there's better battery life and perhaps more cores at a given price point. I'm sure it's a good move for them supply-chain-wise.

They're going to blow Intel systems out of the water, performance-wise. iPad Pros with Apple's CPU are already much faster than laptops. And they look even better when you look at performance/watt.

It looks like Intel is starting to circle the drain. They keep having difficulties trying to shrink their fabs, and other chip foundries can now make smaller chips than Intel can. And AMD seems to have caught up to Intel, performance-wise. Never mind that mobile chips are now a much bigger market segment than the ones that Intel once controlled, and they repeatedly botched their attempts to enter that segment.

I believe AWS has already started to make ARM-based servers available. The time does seem pretty ripe for ARM-based laptops. AMD is making some really great x86 CPUs now. I have a Ryzen 3900X and the performance is amazing.

ARM is slowly moving toward first class citizenship in terms of Linux support. Once there's a really good ARM JVM you don't have to license from Oracle and ARM-based toolchains mature I think server development will move that way. The weakness has always been single thread performance and that doesn't usually matter as much on the server side.