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This is why I use Debian 12 with minimal backports on my main college laptop. (I just have backports kernel and firmware for the Wi-Fi card as well as backports smartctl due to a bugfix).

It isn’t an OS. It’s a set of DLLs to allow Unix applications to be compiled and run on Windows.

In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don't know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.

Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.

Personally, I find Debian pretty good these days. I used to default to Testing, but I've gravitated towards stable.

Honestly, in the age of Flatpak and Steam, almost any distro works.

Like, why the heck is Oracle still on this Earth? The only thing I can think of is MySQL, to which my response is, "Just use MariaDB."

Also, the use of AI-generated images on their website.

For one, AI datasets often break copyright law, frequently appropriating from artists. Executives are also trying to use it to eliminate the jobs of artists, and I feel it’s wrong to try and obsolete something people love doing.

In addition, they take a lot of power, not helping in the way of the needed changes to follow climate goals.

Clarification: Copyright laws can be annoying, and I don’t always agree with them. However, it also protects smaller artists. I think there are many cases where piracy is totally fine, though, like if a company vaults an animated streaming show and gets rid of all other ways to watch it.

I totally agree with you on the Linux side. However, I first got into Linux by using it in Virtualbox on Windows. In the Windows world, as far as I know, it’s the easiest-to-use free-as-in-beer^1^ hypervisor, so long as UEFI support has improved since I last used it.

1: I say this because of the non-libre extension pack.

Qemu/KVM and Virt Manager. I have three VMs that I pass my GPU to: a Hackintosh, a Windows 10, and and Windows 7.

I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.

While some of this can be a problem, I feel like using podman automatically disqualifies you as a regular user.

I think the more accurate title is “Linux is harder for medium power users who are already used to an operating system.”

I honestly feel I am unqualified to say how easy Linux distros are, as I often think to do things that a normal user wouldn’t, thus breaking my system in a way that doesn’t mirror what a regular user would experience.

Honestly, make an issue in the OpenRGB Gitlab.

I got a Roccat Pyro that didn't work, and when I found that out, I was able to test someone's pull requests before they were merged.

He's back from the dead!

AMD unless you’re actually running AI/ML applications that need a GPU. AMD is easier than NVidia on Linux in every way except for ML and video encoding (although I’m on a Polaris card that lost ROCm support [which I’m bitter about] and I think AMD cards have added a few video codecs since). In GPU compute, Nvidia holds a near-dictatorship, one which I don’t necessarily want to engage in. I haven’t ever used an Intel card, but I’ve heard it seems okay. Annecdotally, graphics support is usable but still improving for gaming. Although its AI ecosystem is immature, I think Intel provides special Tensorflow/Torch modules or something, so with a bit of hacking (but likely less than AMD) you might be able to finagle some stuff into running. Where I’ve heard these shine, though, is in video encoding/decoding. I’ve heard of people buying even the cheapest card and having a blast in FFMPEG.

Truth be told, I don’t mess with ML a lot, but Google Colab provides free GPU-accelerated Linux instances with Nvidia cards, so you could probably just go AMD or Intel and get best usability while just doing AI in Colab.

I can't wait to see what they can do, considering what System76 did with just GNOME.

I don't think anything's going to pry me from XFCE, though, except maybe if 4.20 hasn't made much progress on Wayland.

Building a custom Buildroot Linux for a Pentium 2 laptop that can fit on a CD so I could back up a 2.5" IDE drive to a USB drive, probably.

On another note, last night, I had to get a Google TV set up on my dorm Wi-Fi, which requires me to either go through a portal to set it up or to go into my account and add the device's MAC address. The TV (which was brand new and doing OOBE stuff) wouldn't let me go to settings to get the MAC address without a network connection. Even more infuriating, there was a button in the Google Home app that said "Show MAC address", but when I pushed it, it would say "Can't get MAC address." What I ended up doing to get around that crap was setting up my Debian Thinkpad (which I am writing from now) to share its internet connection over ethernet to finish the setup process so I could get to settings and get the MAC address.

On one hand, a funny experience, but on the other hand, I'm simultaneously both mad at Google and my dorm internet provider.

It's very bread and butter, but also very customizable. It's also decently lightweight. Not the lightest, but a good compromise between both.

Some distros don't have the best default config, though.

4G?! That strikes fear into my heart!

This mirrored my though process when composing the screenshot! I almost covered up O'Brien's face with the terminal window, but then realized the guy had gone through enough suffering.

Debian backports security updates to most software, including popular server software. Stable also always uses an LTS kernel, which stays supported upstream. So long as you’re using latest Debian Stable (Bookworm as of this writing), run apt update often (in fact, ‘’’unattended-upgrades’’’ is probably not the worst idea in this case) and do common sense security practices like a firewall and (brain is not working), you should be good.

In brief, it’s totally fine to use Debian and in fact one of the best options in my opinion.

It's always worth checking if MrChromebox supports your specific Chromebook. I got Debian running on an old Chromebook a few months back for fun, but I had to compile a custom kernel to get audio working because AMD Stoney Ridge is weird.

NTFS support is pretty solid on Linux these days, but just so you know, never use it as a root partition.

I have generally used ext4. There's ways to massage it to mount on Windows, as with btrfs. Ext4 is very likely what you should do if you're installing Linux for the first time, as it has had decades of testing and is rather battle-tested

I recently did my first btrfs install. For now, I've had no issues. Of course, some could happen, but I've generally heard btrfs is fine these days. One of its cool things is native compression support, although I forgot to enable it when I did that install.

I've never used XFS.

FAT32 should be rarely used these days due to file size limits and file name limits. The only place where it should still be used is for your EFI partition.

Now exFAT really isn't that unrecognizable. It's supported by pretty much every operating system these days. It's definitely not for root partitions, but should be your default for flash drives and portable hard drives.

On another note, I recently tried Bcachefs on Debian Testing on a random old Chromebook. It is still in development, and not all distros support it yet, but I liked what I saw from my limited experience. It also supports snapshots, and unlike btrfs, has native encryption. For now, just ignore it, but like many in this post have said, keep an eye out for it.

As for ZFS, I've never tried it. The main caveat is due to licensing incompatibility, it is not in the standard Linux kernel and you have to do some special stuff.

To be fair, it would be weird for Google NOT to support Linux, as I believe they use Debian Testing internally.

I've been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 that I got brand new from Best Buy. https://startrek.website/post/13283869

As I have learned the hard way, it truly is.

1. Pain, torture, and screaming as your system slowly burns.
2. No, definitely not.

I think it depends. If a school has a laptop for each student, it is most certainly a Chromebook. However, a lot of schools also have a mix of systems. In elementary school, I was taught to use Microsoft Office on Windows, for instance. At my high school, all the students had Chromebooks, but there were also some labs with Windows machines; graphic design, photography, and film classes had labs full of 5K iMacs.

Debian Stable - yes.

Debian Testing or Sid - 😈

To be fair to Phoronix, I hardly think they're the worst offender in Linux space; I find their Linux coverage to be the least terrible online. They cover new kernel and software developments pretty well.

Other Linux-focused sites seem to mostly consist of clickbait "Ditch Windows 11 headlines", fleeting Linux apps, explaining something that there are already vast amounts of quality articles for, and/or thinly-veiled advertisements.

That is not to say Phoronix is perfect; I don't necessarily enjoy having to run my ad blocker there. However, it's not like it's different on other sites. Comparatively, I find Phoronix to be a decent quality Linux outlet.

I just find Ladybird being as functional as it is a miracle at all. The rate of progress makes me hope Ladybird will one day give Firefox a run for its money in the OSS browser space, but that might be a pipe dream.

Then again, maybe not.

I don't know about other games, but it wasn't too terrible playing Civ 6.

How long did that 35TB take? 12 hours or so?

I’m guessing this is a joke, right?

Most of that sounds pretty easy to pull off. I have a few thoughts, though:

• What games do you run in Steam?
• Just a bit of a warning: Discord is annoying about updates, at least with the Debian version. I can't remember what the Flatpak does.
• For MS Office, most distros should come with LibreOffice. If you have problems with LibreOffice, then Google Docs should be fine.
• You'll have to run Spotify from the browser, but I imagine that won't be a problem, as you're probably not an audiophile
• Run GIMP as a Flatpak, as distro versions tend to have weird bugs with the resynthesizer plugin.

I'm just as stumped, but my best guess is there's some application(s) that expect(s) the Windows Driver store to work and return an exception if it's missing.

Have you tried CoreCtrl? That has made life on my new Thinkpad much easier.

I’ve heard of people coercing even my graphics card, an RX 580. However, I avoid generative AI for ethical reasons and also because Microsoft is trying to shove it down my throat. I really hope that copyright law prevails and that companies will have to be much more careful with what they include in their datasets.

How old of Docx files are you talking? Something like Office 2010 might run quite well, and your father would have probably had to have used some very weird features for it to be incompatible.

Like others have said, I just use two drives, and I can boot into Windows with GRUB.

However, these days, I just do a VM with GPU passthrough. (I installed a second graphics card in my PC just for this.)