I think it’s connected to internal USB…

My issue is that I can’t find ANYTHING on the PC market that is as slick or full featured as a MacBook Air (minus its limited ports).

Hi. Typing this on M2 Air, running Gentoo. 👋

The limited ports drive me crazy too, but what’s maybe EVEN MORE frustrating, is the glossiness of the screen. It is not that good to be used outside, especially because it is dust and finger print magnet. I’m constantly wiping the screen. One thing that smudges the display seems to be the fact that some parts of the base touches the display when the lid is closed. Bad design, or I may just have a faulty specimen. The touchpad is needlessly big, but isn’t really a problem. My wrist can’t bend so that I could move my finger easily from corner to corner. :D Touchpad haptic stuff is nice when dragging. Keyboard is… meh. Nothing special. Then there’s the money problem. You have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to jump off from the base model. I have 256GB/8GB model. The least I should have accepted is 16Gigs of RAM. I got this Air for only for 300 euros (luck was involved), so a money well spent to get to know current Apple HW. But still… I feel I barely made a good deal (because my last laptop was Matebook D with the same amount of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD). I’ll keep using this until I cannot cope with the amount of RAM anymore.

Battery life, performance and passively cooled CPU are the main highlights. Oh and the DAC can drive high impedance heaphones (I have Beyerdynamic DT-770 250 Ohm). I’m most disappointed to the display. The LCD under the glass is fine, but the glass itself is just horrible design. From now on: I choose only matte displays.

I think you’re much better off with Framework. I think that’ll be eventually my choice too.

I think I had my last windows install (Win98) on bare metal in somewhere between 1999-2002.

I tried to cope with Macs until 2004 or 2006. After that Gentoo… Damn it felt good. It was a rough start, but I kinda knew it back then.

I’ve bought some refurbished 1l PCs in places where others might have bought RPi. Drawbacks are more energy consumption and, generally, no GPIO (at least built-in). Also bigger in size. I have one Lenovo M600 which has four serial ports (DB9) and one parallel port (DB25) on some kind of extension module. Because of the module it also has more space for cooler, thus making it passively cooled.

OS: Gentoo Linux x86_64
Host: 10GJS01G00 (ThinkCentre M600)
Kernel: Linux 6.6.101-M600-minimal-0.1
Uptime: 1 day, 23 hours, 59 mins
Packages: 567 (emerge)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Display (ACER H235HL): 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz in 23" [External]
Terminal: tmux 3.5a
CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) N3010 (2) @ 2.24 GHz
GPU: Intel Atom/Celeron/Pentium Processor x5-E8000/J3xxx/N3xxx Integrated Graphics Controller @ 0.60 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 312.46 MiB / 7.37 GiB (4%)
Swap: 0 B / 32.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 8.90 GiB / 19.94 GiB (45%) - xfs
Disk (/var/cache/pkg): 4.41 GiB / 4.84 GiB (91%) - ext4

Fast it ain’t, but does fit the bill.