If you’ve just installed Ubuntu, stick with it for a bit. Get things set up the way you like them. Make a mess if you must. But don’t switch because someone on the internet said one is better than the other. Lots of the Linux sites are just content farms (that 9to5 site) and copy other sites and then people read those and they suggest what they read.

Mint does have some bespoke tools that users like, but those tools can be installed on other distros.

Anyway. First, play around, make a mess, clean it up, get used to it. Then figure out how to backup the configs before you reinstall a new distro.

Other beginner distros are Zorin and Elementary.

I’m a Debian user myself, but I’ve been around and have tried many different distros, WMs, DEs, etc. over the past 19 years. Keep messing around and you’ll find your comfort zone.

Wow, LXQt is just motoring along aren’t they. I use LXQt as my daily driver, but on good old Debian Stable I won’t be seeing this for years haha. Looks like it is only available in the AUR and on Pisilinux (which is cool because it’s only just been released!).

Both of these offer persistence. With Puppy you can choose when you shutdown to save. I think PorteuX works the same way.

Puppy and Porteux

• https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
• https://github.com/porteux/porteux

I’ve only tried Puppy but PorteuX offers more DEs.

DistroWatch has a filter for that

https://distrowatch.com/search-mobile.php?category=Live+Medium#simple

Try be sure to include various DEs or WMs for your friend to see (KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXQt, and maybe a tiling WM?)

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Main issue, for me at least, is about locking publishers into a Google-built version of the Web that generates less revenue for the publisher and sometimes uses more data for the end user.

You might have to bring this question over to the Debian Forum. I don’t work with servers, but as noted above this sounds like a situation where you need to install a newer version of the kernel.

You could try using the Testing ISO https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

Not even a third of the way through… Holy crap.

I don’t want to make generalisations. I have worked with people from all around the world as a teacher at an international business school. A thing that comes up quite often is a certain close-mindedness of people in China. I never would have noticed this myself, but it was my own students from China that mentioned it to me. I’ve only been to China once for 3 weeks and I while talking to people I did hear some comments about other nationalities that made little sense historically. My friend that I was visiting there basically said that anything bad that happens in China is caused by foreigners or Uyghurs which sounds like BS to me.

Why a child, though? That’s some evil shit. Get that person’s phone and look at ther social media, I bet their WeChat is filled with anti-Japanese shit.

The majority of my international students are very worldly and open-minded, and every year there are more like them.

Yes

https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/preferences#behavior_preferences

Tabs and Windows

Open new thunar instances as tabs

Whenever you launch thunar while an existing thunar window is already open, a new tab will be added to the existing thunar window instead of opening a new window.

This could be a Thunar setting or a xfwm4 setting in addition to being a FF setting.

I ended up using Khal too. Hesitant at first, it wound up being good enough for me, especially when it comes to mass importing events. It syncs with my CalDav and phone when using vdirsyncer. 5 to 10 minutes fiddling with the config and haven’t needed to change anything in years.

I did this for several months. If you check out the Alpine community you’ll see that many people do this. So, it is not a dumb idea. Alpine is a “generalist” distro and comes packed with all the DEs and WMs you want. They also accept package requests and are usually pretty fast about it.

I would recommend using the Edge branch just to have access to the newest packages, but keep an eye on the issue tracker before hitting update. Also, get on their Matrix and other accounts to follow different discussions.

Many have surprised me for different reasons.

The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.

First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so well, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.

(just gonna be annoying and note that the 404 Media article isn’t a true “paywall”, they addressed this on their blog: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/. If you create an account you don’t need to pay and they email the published articles in full every day.)

I use super boring Claws Mail for my personal email. I handle my contacts with Khard and calendars with Khal.

I don’t use a Yubikey though.

I’ve been using Linux for a long time. When I install my fist step is to uninstall. I get not wanting things taking up space.

You should be able to remove things like LibreOffice and so on without any issues.

In the past, dependency chains screwed things up depending on the distro. (Remove Chrome? Oh, well, we’ll remove your DE too! I remember once uninstalling VLC, which I never use, wanted to uninstall the browser and other media apps…)

I did go and look around, and you are right. Lots of posts, older and more recent, telling people not to uninstall and change to a minimal distro.

cmus is great for music

mpv for videos, there are different extensions to automatically open YT videos with it.

beets for sorting music

nicotine plus for looking for music

syncthing

zathura

improving performance isn’t easy if you feel like things are running smoothly, but there are a few laptop specific things like tlp that you could look into although I suspect that distro uses them out of the box

Outside of Gnome I think you may need to install an additional package like evolution-on

Already mentioned, but Strawberry is worth checking out. If Quod Libet works, stick with that. I liked it when I used it.

mpd has a number of frontends.

No longer developed I think, but I’ll mention gmusicbrowser as it used to be my go-to.

cmus is what I use now.

I also have a very large library and use Debian 12.5 so I’ll bookmark this thread for later.