KDE, because I’m too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that’s more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

I guess RAM is a bell curve now.

• 32GB: Enough.
• 16GB: Not enough.
• 8GB: Not enough.
• 4GB: Believe it or not, enough.

Last time I distrohopped, this was actually one of my main benchmarks. If I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute, I picked a different distro.

Honestly, there are probably enough people using ublock with tor browser that you can still retain most of the benefits if you do the same. You’ll just be in a smaller cohort than if you didn’t.

Stable, in this context, just means “point release”. If you meant “doesn’t break”, that describes most rolling release distros.

…unless you’ve used KDE in the last month. Holy cow, just let me alt-tab into a fullscreen window without throwing a fit.

I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

Too hot, but every other time this has happened in the last several months, they’ve been able to spread dirt and gravel on top to make a temporary road.

Depending on when this picture was taken, it’s just the outermost layer that’s solid. The lava flows from underneath.

I played with Endeavor years ago, but not extensively. If memory serves, it’s pretty much just preconfigured Arch with some nice theming, a Calamares installer, and a few simple scripts. Garuda adds even more theming (too much for my tastes, actually), a few GUI utilities, notifications when your system is overdue for an update, and an update script that runs common post-update tasks (like grub-install) and takes snapper snapshots automatically, so basically user-friendly bloat.

If you like arch but want a plug’n play distro, just do a plug’n play arch-based distro. Garuda is braindead easy.

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Wait, are you setting up PPAs? If you’re using a user-friendly distro, either flathub should be enabled by default or the AUR is easily accessible with pamac or the chaotic-AUR. If software availability is a problem, I don’t know what to tell you; I think you started with a more difficult distribution than you intended to. PPAs suck.

Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won’t find many lowercase “l” libertarians here though.

How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I’d pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.

Well, looks like I forgot for another month, but 3 months was no problem either.

I’m shocked Lemmy has so many users. Feels like only a few thousand.

I haven’t updated my Arch install for almost 2 months. Things are going to be… seemless, probably. I do this all the time. It never breaks.

Typical Gnome user.