HN user
Also use a thinkpad, X1 carbon from 2015.
Run Manjaro with gnome-shell (actually gnome-shell-performance until 3.32 is released). Its lightening quick, reasonably stable, good battery life.
I also tried KDE, which works quite well, but the battery life was quite poor and I find the general KDE experience abrupt.
Now my 2017 mbp just gathers dust, never going back.
I originally used subl, then switched for vscode for 3 years or so, and have now switched back to subl. I switched back to subl mainly because I downgraded my system from 16GB RAM to 8GB (switched from 2017 mbp to a 2015 carbon X1) and vscode had too large a memory footprint to use.
subl is notably faster, its also a very well rounded editor with a tiny memory footprint...
But I also have the issue that the plugin support is abysmal, that sane defaults are non-existent and it takes a long time to get things to work well with a very popular web techstack like React, Styled Components, eslint. Even now there are times when the syntax highlighting is wrong.
It would do subl a great service if they improved the package management and created a number of officially supported packages for popular techstacks that allow people to simply (ideally) 1 click configure the editor.
I shouldn't have to read a 15 minute Medium tutorial on how to configure eslint, IMO that is ridiculous.