Apple’s making it easy these days. Mac Minis are cheap and more than enough computer for 95% of people’s tasks, while also using sipping watts. I’m on a M4 Mac Mini and it’s using 3.91 watts right now. I’ve run it at full tilt for extended periods of time and I barely heard the fan. It even runs BG3 somehow.
That said, the power button being on the bottom is dumb but not a real issue. MacOS’s assumption that you’re going to be using a trackpad is annoying for those of us with nice mice. Actually, MacOS is just annoying in a lot of ways. I get that the bumpers are there to keep people from causing long lines at Genius Bars, but I wish there were just a single button that I could hit that tell the machine I know my way around a *nix and don’t need to be babied at every turn.
Absolute truth. I haven’t run into a single game that doesn’t run on my second-from-top-of-the-line gaming PC I built last year under Linux. I know they exist because I see articles about a developer removing Proton support for odd reasons, but it hasn’t impacted me yet.
MS has largely made their own OS irrelevant by putting the Office Suite in the cloud. If you need Excel but don’t want Copilot throwing all your screengrabs to Redmond a box running Ubuntu or Mint or Bazzite or MacOS (a legit option for some people with niche applications that cater to the Apple crowd). MS is following the same playbook with the Xbox brand. If everything is an Xbox then why would you harness yourself to a crappy MS branded one?