How- How dare you‽

Sure, a WM will run fine and leaves you with more resources to work with. Your setup will still struggle running a modern browser.

Yeah, none are going to be fast. Browsing is going to be slow no matter what, unless you use something like lynx. The best I can give you is Falkon, but don’t open many tabs.

Well, for example, upgrading between releases is done by manually editing sources.list and some other steps, and there’s no easy tool for that. This is not difficult, exactly, but for people with little experience it’s a bit daunting. Debian in general isn’t the most new user friendly distro, in my experience. Distros like Mint and Ubuntu make the Debian experience slightly easier. Not that Debian is some esoteric system.

Well, what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle, maybe, but if you have prior Linux experience, you’ll be fine.

It may be a lot to take in at first, but seems to me you’ve got it!

A repository (or repo) is a server that hosts program files for your distribution. Distributions host their own repositories from which you can install software with your package manager, like APT or DNF or others. If you only install software from your distribution’s repository, there’s likely no clashes with software versioning and dependencies, and the packages are about as reliable as they can be (which doesn’t mean there’s never malware). If you add third party repositories for software not available from your distribution’s repository, it’s more likely there will be issues, because the distribution doesn’t guarantee the packages work well together.

For example, Debian and Arch don’t retrieve and install their software from the same source. They have their own servers (repositories) hosting software compiled to work with their particular distro and to be used by their chosen package manager.

Flatpak (or Snap or Guix) is a separate package manager that handles it’s own dependencies and doesn’t clash with your distribution’s own software manager.

Does this help?

Very little. If I’m being honest with myself, I have a slight preference for how DOS/Windows handled mounting drives. I’ve never been a huge fan of the UNIX directory structure anyway. I’d like to see some sort of filesystem hierarchy reform for a clearer format.

But of course, using Linux is a relief in most ways. There’s no going back.

One of the reasons I feel Debian isn’t quite new user friendly is definitely having to manually modify your sources list when there’s a new version release. It’s not exactly hard, but for a new user it can be intimidating. I do find it weird that Debian hasn’t created an automatic tool for that, unlike practically every other distro out there.

Debian is good, but sometimes its age shows.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

Is SteamOS even available for desktop PCs yet? I don’t think it is.

From the SteamOS page:

We expect most SteamOS users to get SteamOS preinstalled on a Steam Deck or device that incorporates SteamOS. The only devices officially supported on SteamOS right now are Steam Deck and Legion Go S. We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other AMD powered PC handhelds has been improved.

Until this changes, which I think is in the works, I recommend using some other popular distro.

Guix is a package manager you can install on most distros and works beside other package managers, similar to Snap and Flatpak. And it’s a distro.

Wait, is it 2006 already?

No luck needed, it’ll go fine. You pretty obviously have all the experience you need.

Better for what? The question in isolation is fairly meaningless.

I hope this means they’ll release it on GOG.

It was 20 years ago and Microsoft was terrible and Windows was awful. Later on I used Windows 8.1 somewhat out of necessity until it was deprecated and went back to Linux because Microsoft is terrible and Windows 10/11 is awful, but now with all kinds of invasive telemetry.

I spare very little mental capacity to how people utilize their computers where it doesn’t directly affect me. No, it is not something I find worth being bothered about. Life’s hard enough regardless.

Likely not. I’ve tried skipping a release once by accident (I didn’t pay enough attention) and it ended with a bricked system and a full reinstall. Don’t do it.