I remember it as just beer and cider, with the addition of blackcurrant making it a Purple Nasty, and all sorts of tales of how they allegedly reacted to make a vicious drink more than the sun of the parts that I am sure was fiction.

And for Americans, this means alcoholic ciders, since they also call raw apple juice cider, and most Americans have no idea what a blackcurrant is (a delicious intense berry that was illegal to cultivate in the US for a lot of the recent past).

Looks like they have reasonable height windows, unlike the weird little slit windows that Amtrak typically has for some reason. I’ve always assumed it’s to minimize greenhouse effects, because maybe nobody was able to imagine blinds or heat-reflective glass used elsewhere.

While Amtrak trains always seem crude and old fashioned compared to modern trains in other countries, one thing they’ve always been is very comfortable and spacious. I’m a little concerned by 27% more seats - is that the end of the generous space?

I’m probably unlikely to find out for a while, because faced with the usually dramatically higher prices for ~20% shorter journey times, I usually choose the cheaper, slightly slower standard Amtrak service instead of Acela. It’s a testament to the benefits of rail that even the rickety slow Amtrak trains are often still a good option for the few journeys they serve.

I wasn’t trying to give you advice, I was describing the situation in general. 🤷

It’s very hardware dependent with a few problem’s like Nvidia. For Best results go established brands that support Linux like thinkpads.

I know about window managers and how using them will reduce the memory usage by system a lot because they are less bloated etc.

Ehhhh… I think it’s more “not using a curated general-purpose DE”, rather than “using a WM”. All graphical systems include a WM, and a DE in some senses is more of a concept or category than a concrete thing. The choice is whether it’s one you cobble a DE together yourself, or use a pre-configured, curated one.

Many people use stand-alone WMs and then create their own DE, but quite a few of us put the WM of our choice within existing DE because we want the WM but have no interest in re-inventing all those DE wheels (and/or have >4Gb memory so the “bloat” is not an issue). In my case it’s i3 on Gnome via gnome-flashback.

Curated DEs do tend to use more resources - typically mostly memory - partly because they tend to be comprehensive for diverse users. Rolling your own minimal DE for your personal needs can often be lighter weight. If you have a very constrained system then it can be beneficial, though that circumstance is more and more unusual these days when 8Gb of memory is often considered “minimal”.

The main reasons for making your own DE is to do things exactly the way you want, at the expense of having to do it. Beware though, there will be various helpful features of DEs you may not realize you appreciate until you have realize you don’t have them. E.g. what happens when you plug in a USB drive? Nothing, by default - a DE usually manages that. SSHing into servers a lot - a credentials agent is nice - better add one of those…

A lot of rolling your own DE is months or years of “oh yeah, that is a useful thing to have; I need to find tools and configure them to do that”. Conversely, dropping your WM of choice into another DE is often a case of “huh, that happens automagically; nice!”.

Dynamic typing is shit. But type annotation plus CI checkers can give you the same benefits in most cases.

Once you need performance

If you need more performance. Many things just don’t.