Keyboard issues seems to be common: youtube.com/watch

No esc key on Pro 😡

Yeah, as a VIM user, it took quite a bit of time getting used to the touchbar escape, it's definitely not unusable, but not great either.

Jan Vladimir Mostert I use i3 window manager by default which is like no UI at all.

Although I have not used i3 on Ubuntu. In addition to UI, Ubuntu also have many proprietary software that if you go on deleting those will end up creating a new distro.

I have no beef with Arch, but I am a debian person. Customization are possible with every distro out there you just have to choose one that fits you. And I love debian(currently MxLinux).

Same problem of MBP keyboard with me as well. I got the keyboard replaced 3 times and for free. I had to write a mail to Apple Support in US in 2018 about keyboard problem, I talked to their cust executive directly, so they fixed it the third time for free. Since that repair I use a silicon cover and it has been 1 year my keyboard had no problems.

Likewise, Debian and its derivatives are nice, everything is in sane places and its mostly user friendly, its packaging system is easy to use and applications are generally available in .deb if it's available on Linux.

CentOS / RedHat / Fedora and its rpm packages are just weird, can't get used to the rpm flags, rpm -i / rpm -U / rpm -e / rpm -q / ... VS Debian, apt-get install / update / remove / ... package, but that's just preference. I remember on CentOS, there was also yum install, yum update and then yumdb. Would be nice if there was one package manager that could interface all of these so that you could use a single package manager across all distros. Security on CentOS is way better than on Debian for example, so if security is a concern, then CentOS is not a bad option if you don't mind old packages.

Gentoo's Portage is rather nice, but compiling packages from source can take forever on slow machines (had to wait a whole weekend for Firefox to compile on my old 800MHz computer, on my AMD Socket 754, 3.2 GHz machine, it only took a few minutes)

i3 WM looks very similar to Blackbox, in Blackbox you had to physically write a bit config / code to get a taskbar, your application launcher is right clicking on the desktop, that's all you had. For a lowe powered dev machine, that's perfect (it actually reduces distractions), typically i only needed my IDE, browser and terminal, anything else i would start from command line.

RE MBP: You can claim a refund for any keyboard repairs you've done out of your own pocket. Silicon cover would have increased my overheating issues and probably would not have stopped the keys from cracking or breaking off the keyboard. If you write 100s of thousands of lines of code a year (wrote close to a million lines on that keyboard if not more), that keyboard simply doesn't last, the old design lasted fine for such heavy workloads. Cheap microsoft keyboards did the same, spacebars cracked, springs broke, enter keys cracked, vowels became non responsive after heavy use, their more expensive keyboards lasted forever which means this is simply a poorly designed keyboard on the MBP using cheap materials.

I'll try gentoo.