I think your assessment of Linux Mint with XFCE is a really good first choice. Cinnamon could be worth a try though as the UI is a bit more modern looking. I’m biased towards XFCE because it looks fine and runs extremely well on old laptops. I’ve got a laptop from 2008 running it (it’s my only computer that still has a disc drive) and it’s honestly a usable machine again.
I think XFCE Mint is a good experience. That said, depending on how W10 has been running for you, Cinnamon won’t be worse than that.
Oh yeah for sure. I think if Gnome works for people they should use it. I’m not stoked on the situation of Gnome Extensions being needed for some pretty basic customisations, adding instability to the DE though.
Gnome has the apple philosophy that the user conforms to technology, not the other way around.
It seems to hit that right balance of bleeding edge while SUSE are still testing the packages for a bit to ensure there aren’t bad updates. Fedora sounds interesting to me as well, but I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Gang. The only distro I haven’t been able to break after 6 months (well, I have, but I’ve been able to snapper rollback every time)
Had Jellyseer break on me again on Truenas scale, something about a jellyfin API blah blah blah. Decided that Sonarr and Radarr are fine enough to interface with that I don’t need it and deleted the image.
I did a physics degree and am comfortable with Joules, but in the context of electricity bills, kWh makes more sense.
All appliances are advertised in terms of their Watt power draw, so estimating their daily impact on my bill is as simple as multiplying their kW draw by the number of hours in a day I expect to run the thing (multiplied by the cost per kWh by the utility company of course).
I was really confused by that and that the decided units weren’t just in W (0.1 kW is pretty weird even)
Agreed, especially if the point is to breathe life into old hardware.
As the other commenter said, time shift will save you too. Snapper built into Tumbleweed is pretty good though as well as YasT.
As an NVIDIA user, snapper has saved me multiple times.
Have got two of my family members onto bitwarden and even that is a lot for the tech-illiterate. Couldn’t imagine Keepass+syncthing.
Ultimately, bitwarden is better than using hunter12 for everything like how they were.
Was that updating with “zypper dup”? I’ve heard going through discover or zypper update isn’t the recommended way strictly speaking, so its worth mentioning.
Opensuse tumbleweed. The packages go through a testing process unlike Fedora AFAIK.
Great answer, thanks!
What is the big difference between Cosmic and Gnome? I know System76 are developing it so I would imagine they have a problem with Gnome and their hardware business.
I used popOS! for a year and did get annoyed that Gnome required extensions that were not necessarily maintained in order to allow for what I considered to be basic customisation.
On OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE now, but interested to see what the philosophical difference is between Gnome and Cosmic.
I think there’s an obsidian extension that allows you to basically save the notes in a github repository, making it cloud based kind of.
Germany… maybe openSUSE?