Oh, I’m keenly aware! I’m running vanilla arch on my laptop right now, and planning to migrate my desktop this year, I’m just pleasantly surprised how many have been willing to take the plunge

Telebotomy perhaps

The prestige behind the thinkpad brand specifically predates lenovo. They bought it from IBM in '05. AFAIK they’ve always been seen as reliable, well built laptops, albeit a bit pricier.

As far as spyware, with win11 being what it is your options are install Linux or live with it no matter which manufacturer you go with.

I really wish it was easier to open up a TV, rip out all the compute and replace it with a custom display driver. Someone could unironically make a decent amount of money selling diy TV stupidification kits

You just have to deal with all the smart garbage every time you turn it on

Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora’s getting in on gaming.

Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness