biscuits
I believe that PipeWire is really solid piece of software, but I couldn't just let go of JACK just yet. JACK just works and it's easy to modify important parameters like sample rate or buffer size. On PipeWire I still don't know how to quite do that, I get lost in all those configuration files, but I will get it someday.
Also one more thing that might be niche, but it's important for me is JACK timecode (for synching i.e. a DAW with video player) which PipeWire doesn't support at all at the moment. Getting it work on PipeWire (converting JACK timecode to LTC or MTC) gets ugly pretty quickly. So I'm glad PipeWire allows to use it however I like it, either as JACK server or client.
I have had some problems with PipeWire as JACK replacement, mostly it was some tearing artifacts that were very annoying. Recently though I learned how to use PipeWire (which is great for general desktop audio usage + works with Bluetooth really good) with JACK for pro-audio applications. By using the JACK DBus detect module it is possible to turn PipeWire into JACK client when ever the latter one is started.
So this way it is not required to use PulseAudio at all with JACK. There's also possibility to use PipeWire as JACK server because it also provides such API.
I've fully switched to Wayland some time ago (it could be already a year) after I learned about how insecure X really is and I honestly do not experience any issues that I sometimes see on the internet. I've been using Gnome for few months, but now I switched to KDE. I think a lot of apps are working natively on Wayland, but for other cases you have XWayland that also works flawlessy in my opinion.
One of things that was issue for me was that I couldn't use Auto-Type feature in KeePassXC, because Wayland doesn't let apps pretend to be a keyboard or capture windows as easily as X does. Funnily enough, I've managed to get it working by running keepassxc --platform xcb, but it stopped working some time ago and I'm not entirely sure why. Other thing that is a problem for me is screen sharing. Wayland doesn't allow apps to capture screen as I mentioned earlier so it heavily relies on PipeWire for this and PipeWire has its own sets of problems. It seems working correctly for the most part, but I couldn't really figure out how to share screen with sound. Not a dealbreaker for me, and a workaround would be to route audio as a microphone input for example, but it is an issue nonetheless. This is only a problem on Discord, in OBS you can easily select video and audio sources.
If you're using KDE already, you could just select Plasma (Wayland) in your display manager and play with it a bit to see if you like it and experience any issues.
Also keep it mind that, while Grist looks like a spreadsheet, there are some key differences between it and a typical spreadsheet (see here). You may need to spend some time with the documentation (which is really good btw, and they have video tutorials as well), but in my opinion it's really worth it.
I use Grist for this purpose. Check out this template, this may be just what you want and using widgets it is quite easy to create a form to append to the expenses database (just like here). Grist works really nice on mobile too and is also pretty easy to self-host if you need an extra degree of privacy, but you can use the official instance as well.
If you want I can send you my Grist template that does pretty much all things you want.
It really depends what other init system you mean, but openrc checks all the boxes. It uses shell scripts, but I've never seen any that would be 500 lines long (at least in Alpine). Services can have defined dependencies as well can be classified into groups so you don't need to configure for any specific service, you can just say 'depend on dns' and any available will be run. And openrc also supports running services in parallel.
I have similar laptop currently and I have it set up exactly as you want. I'm on Void Linux with KDE Wayland, but I was using Fedora few months ago and I remember it working correctly too. Wayland uses integrated GPU by default, so in case I want some program to use dedicated GPU, there's handy script to do that (it just sets few env variables).
I think it should be quite easy to set X with i3 to use integrated GPU, just like Wayland does.
I think most modern laptops output to display via integrated GPU even if it's dedicated GPU doing the work. I know there are laptops with much chips that let user select which GPU is directly connected to display, but I guess those are mostly high-end models.
I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.
But in "regular" environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.
Yeah, but you have compared top-of-the-line Ryzen model vs. Intel's high-medium tier. That's not gonna really help.