For what it’s worth, a large number of the things you listed are actually portable into Sway, i3wm, and a lot of other tiling wms just by way of running the KDE settings daemons - I do the same kinds of things (network printer, theming, auto-mount, auto-start, XDG config, firewall, vpn, network settings, monitors, keyboard layout) just by having i3wm start up xfce-settings-daemon.
I’m not familiar enough with KDE to make promises about grub and splash, but I would imagine those would also work exactly the same as well. In fact, a little bit of searching and it looks like if you’re on Wayland you could even just replace KWin (the KDE window manager) with Sway in the startup files and be 95% of the way there. Might just need to configure a system bar or something to that effect.
Cloning a base image and creating VMs from it is one of the coolest things. I do it for my VMs on my Proxmox cluster any time i need a new server for something - and yeah just copying my dev desktop to my new laptop for going to a conference was such a great way to avoid hours of setup
I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.
Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.
I store mine in a selfhosted Nextcloud instance accessible only via a Nebula overlay network (alternative to tailscale) and it’s both convenient and secure.
I store mine in a selfhosted Nextcloud instance, KeepassDX on Android supports accessing it directly. Works perfectly and even provides an autofill service for Android. Very easy and very convenient.
The unfortunate truth is that they do until they don’t - Anyone I’ve spoken to in the service industry has basically said that they love the good busy nights and the rest is stressful. Nobody should have to worry that they might not get generous enough customers during their workday, else basically starve. What a horrible way to live.
As an avid user of a foldable, the main points for me are around the convenience and flexibility. I mean, it is literally a bigger screen, but carried around in my pocket. At all times. I don’t need to juggle account information and managing battery and storing/swapping between two devices if I want a screen that’s bigger than a usual phone for playing games on (RCT Classic, Baldur’s Gate, Bloons, Arknights, Crashlands, RuneScape… Lots of great games benefit from the better precision of playing on a bigger screen).
It’s great for reading manga, reading PDFs, watching videos, running two apps side by side (ticket on one side, team chat on the other), each with the normal screen real estate if a whole phone!
I adore the ability to pull out my phone and use it one handed like a normal phone, but then instantly switch to a much bigger, more comfortable canvas running the exact same instance of an app the moment I need to do something more involved than typing a few sentences or scrolling on Lemmy. If I realize I want to type with two hands, it’s so much faster and more comfortable on the inner screen thanks to the split keyboard.
Then it’s on top of all of that that with a flip out kickstand case on it I can carry around a pocket folding keyboard+trackpad in the other pocket and a decent pair of earbuds and then if I’m out and about I can comfortably use it like a mini laptop, writing code with Neovim via Termux or writing things down in my Obsidian vault, or even just chatting - All without it feeling like I’m squinting at a tiny phone screen.
To be fair … That could just be the autism though.