Quite recently I moved to my first trackball (Elecom Deft Pro) and that was a life changer. I've shared my experience here.

I've been watching on the framework machines for my next one. It looks like fwupd support them for BIOS updates. Framework owners will know more for sure.

Thanks very much for this important feedback. Framework is definitely taking the lead in responses to this post.

Novacustom... Never heard of it. The almost insignificant disadvantage I can see so far for Framework is that they don't use open-source boot. Everyone so far stand behind Framework. How would you sell me on System76 or Novacustom?

Oh you mean mullvad! They're two different apps.

One would say you're more weird than me then. That makes me feel better ^^

Just realized that I had this line in my config already but the change was not applied until I reboot. 😳

Thanks for the update. Have fun!

Thank you for this addition. I very much appreciate the fediverse community who is helping people to understand things, share their knowledge, and acting nicely (if we exclude some rare people who are clearly not used to live within a sane community). I've seen home manager but this raised one more question to me: what's the added value compared to stow for example? Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

Wish someone would come with something like tut for mastodon.

XPS13 has very highly positive reviews from several sources. I've had the same dilemma as you 3 years ago and went with the XPS13 9310 and I'm extremely happy with it. So much that I bought an on sale Razer Book 13 for my wife since it's almost an XPS 13 with a different name.
Note that I don't have the "developer" version of the XPS but it runs with no issues at all. I can install Linux myself, don't need someone to do that for me and I'm not using Ubuntu anyway. Also, the delivery delay were insane when I bought it and I was extremely lucky to find a "regular" version in one of my local stores.

I've tried a lot of laptops over 30 years and no brand was convincing enough to get me returning to them every time. I just go where I can find the hardware I need enclosed in a well-enough robust case and I'm done. All the parts are sold by the same manufacturers anyway. The difference between brands is just which parts are assembled together and how well it's done.

As a bonus, it's also nice that the firmware of the XPS 13 (including the bios) can be updated with fwupd.

The behavior you are requesting of bspwm is counter-intuitive to this rule you specifically wrote. Nonetheless, if VS Code popup windows have a different instance name, you could have a script running in the background which checks instance name of any new window and execute the command bspc desktop -f last when a VS Code popup appears.
If the instance name is the same for VS Code main app and its popup windows, you may listen to the state of VS Code windows (using bspc subscribe; see the manpage) and execute the previous command on VS Code floating windows (because popups will be floating).
For example, apply this to all VS Code windows:

while bspc subscribe -c 1 node_focus node_state > /dev/null; do
    bspc query -N -n "focused.floating" | while read -r wid; do
    bspc desktop -n $wid -f last
done

For your second question, if I understand correctly you're trying to have a given workspace moving to your external monitor when available and returning to your primary monitor if no other monitor is connected. You can look at the archwiki to learn how to setup bspwm for multi monitors. Using the same if conditions as explained in this wiki you could also have for example a rule bspc rule -a Code follow=on desktop='^4' when only one monitor is connected, and bspc rule -a Code follow=on desktop='^7' when an external monitor is connected (and workspace 7 will be defined to be shown on your external monitor).