I currently use VSCode. I did use Emacs for quite a while, and it in itself is a fantastic editor (if not, an operating system :^), don't get me wrong. But I had a few reasons for switching.

• Emacs is a very rigorous editor to configure, and whilst it comes with many features out of the box, a lot of those are either broken, or highly unfinished / unpolished, so it is effectively required to manually configure your environment. This also includes that the codebase for GNU Emacs itself is, and is still built upon, a fossil, and it can show it's age in a few ways. VSCode is typically ready for development out of the box, if not, easy to get set up using plugins, and customization usually just takes tweaking a few things in the settings.json at most.
• Improved language support is a must in many cases. Emacs language support or LSP is usually good, but in some cases it can be quite unoptimized (for example, the Dart LSP client on Emacs does not run well whatsoever in my experience). On VSCode, the language plugins are quite often official, and can come with some extremely helpful features.
  • On this, Jupyter Notebook is absolutely perfect on VSCode. Yes, Org Mode works great, but Jupyter is typically the most expected in my usecase, especially in standardized data science. EIN works, but it's not nearly as smooth and efficient to use as the VSCode support is.

Again, Emacs is great, I configured my environment myself using parts from Nano Emacs, and a good Evil mode configuration is an ergonomic dream (yes, I also use VSCodeVim), but it gets tiring to maintain it after a while, and I just want something that works, and VSCode fits that bill, not just perfectly, but with flying colors to all of my other requirements.

Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.

Even as I'm on the more left end, I'd say not all conservatives or right-leaning people are racist homophobic bigots, though. If anything, I'd say a sizable portion have a right-leaning non-discriminatory worldview, mainly economic.

Admittedly, as much as I'm preferring the fediverse, it is definitely an echo chamber, Lemmy included.

I tried out Mastodon once, never really got into it. Fast forward to Twitter's acquisition, shit hit the fan, you know the story, but I wasn't really convinced until some of the decisions lately. Tried out Mastodon again, and whilst it was nice, it wasn't really for me. I figured I'd try looking for another instance, and I ended up landing myself on Kbin as it has Lemmy support for topical discussions, as well as microblogging capabilities for who I keep track of on Mastodon. I don't post that actively, but it's been great so far!

Cramming for a 1600 SAT? Pffff, just grind Tetris for a center 4-wide, get some real work done.

In my curiosity, I bought a Nook Simple Touch off eBay for 15 dollars a few months ago. It actually works really great for reading EPUBs off Overdrive and OpenLibrary, and it definitely makes night reading a hell of a lot more comfortable, lasts quite long on battery, even as a cheap second hand device.

If you're intending to purely stream games or something along those lines, you might want to look at one of those really cheap Fire tablets, new or used. They clearly are intended with planned obsolescence in mind unfortunately, but as long as you get one from 2015 after, you probably shouldn't have any issues with app compatibility. Do note that if you plan on rooting or installing Linux, they aren't that great of an option as their process is strange and complicated.

In terms of running Linux on, there are a few Atom-based cheap 8-10 inch tablets from Dell and other manufacturers that you can buy for dirt cheap used, and they could probably serve your purpose quite well.

Name is Brent, pals screwing around. Pal takes Mr. Krabs quote, "sponge boy bob", puts name in, "brent boy bob." Abbreviates to bbmb, "m" is pronoun.

I use a near-base model 2020 M1 Air, 512GB SSD and still 8GB RAM. One thing I can confirm is that this thing very rarely slows down. That being said, I'm a software developer that doesn't do anything THAT rigorous, but I've been able to smoothly do tasks in the background during compiling, and goes through it quickly. I have some friends that do heavy work with Logic Pro, and their base M1s have no problem as well.

So all in all, whilst it ultimately depends on the type of work and intent to be done with it, $3000 is still probably overkill, even with a Mac.

I just started using kbin.social after not really feeling satisfied with Mastodon personally, wanting something more topical like Lemmy, but I still wanted some Mastodon compatibility due to most of my mutuals on the Fediverse using Mastodon. Landed myself here, so far so good!