My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.

It’s not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.

For most use cases, including backend development, they’ll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I’m still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.

At this point, even Microsoft wants them to stop using it, but they are stubborn and try to keep it running until they turn off the lights the hard way.

With the “wonderful” tooling at work, we use Skype for Business. Naturally, that is not the primary place to send around code and configs, but a 1-liner or 2-liner happens.

You can’t believe the nonsense it does when you try to copy & paste it. Spaces get turned into non-breaking spaces etc. Looks completely normal when pasted directly into vim on a console, but will give “odd” error messages.