Also, do you need that long battery life? If yes, ARM or really new intel processors with energy saving cores seem to be the way to go.

I don’t have experience with it myself. But what I’ve read so far is, that the Snapdragon support by Linux is quite bad. Not sure if I would recommend that…

But the new Intel CPU’s are great. They are quite efficient and performant.

It’s a more than 4 years old blog post.

I can’t tell much about the things that the writer complains about. But concerning Cosmic: I think a new additional DE is a win. People who like it can use it, others can skip it. More variation means more choice.

Personally: I find Cosmic still a bit barebone. It is very fast. It think it looks quite good (besides their wallpapers). It’s not yet there, where it needs to be for me to use it as a daily driver, but I find it impressive what System 76 released in their first final version.

Gnome is the most beautyful DE in my opinion, but I find it’s UX absolut horrible. I hate usining it without quite some extensions and I do absolutely not use it. Look at it, yeah. But using it is not intuitive at all for me.

Luckily, there are other DE’s I like. That’s the beauty about Linux.