Linux Mint Debian Edition: xfce, Firefox running, 12 tabs open, just under 3GB utilized. All my usual stuff open too, Telegram, Next cloud, etc.

I bet you’d be good with it and an SSD and a bit of swap. (I have no swap used.)

Oh, it’s awful! I mean, I knew it was going to be a bit heavier, with the dual screens, but I figured for media and stuff I could use it like a laptop. What I didn’t know? No keyboard on the e-ink. If you have it in landscape, you have a giant, unusable keyboard on the LCD part. No backlight on the e-ink. No way to move apps from one screen to the other without closing them out completely. But this is the part that really bakes my bacon… No portrait mode on the e-ink side. None. The good eReader review seems to have missed that it’s absolutely, 100%, stuck in landscape! Also, the battery is awful. I listened to a podcast for 10 minutes, display off, and burnt 10% of the battery. I have 10-year-old laptops with better battery life. I asked for a return/refund, but of course, crickets. Their only support is apparently on a Facebook page. I won’t be getting Facebook any time soon, but I am told that they are ignoring support requests anyways.

I’m still too dumb to learn… Ask me about my OKPad! In fact, ask me for my OKPad. Please, take the god awful thing off my hands!

I’m guessing ARM specifically? I use a Lenovo Yoga convertible in tablet mode with Fedora and the onscreen keyboard for media consumption, but not as my daily device. Not great battery life, but I got it dirt cheap used.

Concatulations! You are now cat staff. Commence feeding and changing litter for the next 10-20 years.

I tried Bazzite, but I had trouble getting a couple of my school apps to run. VMware Workstation wouldn’t install the kernel modules it needs, and I couldn’t find an installation guide. Getting it to run on boring Fedora took me a lot of tries, to be honest. I wish I could use literally any other hypervisor, but my teachers kinda hate me for not using Windows, so…

I’m similar in apps, and I get along nicely with Fedora. Had to muck about a bit to get Auto1111 working, but otherwise no issues. I use a fair number of flatpaks where Ubuntu offers snaps. I use VMware instead of virtual box, and that was a pain to install. Nvidia plays nice if you set up rpmfusion repos.

Yup! Security updates, but not build updates. You’re good until 23H02 goes out of support, then you’ll have to reinstall 11. At least, that’s what I understand. My 21H02 machines just never get the push for 22,23,24 etc major build updates.

I am a Fedora fan, but I do think that they may have issues with needing to upgrade every year. I am currently holding off on a Fedora 40-41 upgrade on my school laptop until finals are done, just in case something breaks.

I’ve been on Fedora since about 32ish? And I’ve had a couple of times where the upgrade didn’t go smooth.

For grandparents, I’d probably lean towards Debian with Gnome.

I did this for a few systems, but it doesn’t do major build updates. I’m getting full screen “You need to upgrade” notifications on a few 21h02 machines now, yet Windows update says it’s up to date.

This is a bit of a slog, but I have tailscale and rdclient running on an iplay mini 50. I have a SIM card in it, but I am on wifi 95% of the time, and it connects back to my desktop at home running Fedora. Not quite as good as being in front of it, but it’s a pretty reliable workflow, and I can switch the same remote session to my laptop if I need more screen size.

Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not “the kids”.

Does it give you anything? Can you select safe mode or nomodeset from the grub menu, or do you get no grub menu at all? I almost pulled the trigger on a used getac system a while back, but couldn’t justify the cost. If you get it working, please tell me how it goes under Linux!

This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.

I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.

Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I’d like, but got pretty good battery life.

Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I’m a sucker for punishment.

I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.

I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.

sudo apt dist-upgrade Then reboot?

(I think. Not an expert.)

Honestly? I found it suggested on that other site. Something to do with the kernel modules. All I know is that I had no working GPU, ran that, rebooted, and then everything was gold.

I had to depmod -a, before then my gaming was messed up.