Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn’t be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I’ll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

Let’s just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

I’m not sure about NVIDIA drivers. Otherwise, it depends on what kernel your distro is using; if it’s Debian, there’s a chance you might have problems, though you could install the backports kernel, which I do on my Thinkpad E16.

Why do we even bother with data at all? Let’s just not exist - humans greatly increase attack surface.

I think it wasn’t actually Stallman - it’s a common misattribution.

Depends on your hardware and distro. Linux-libre not be so bad assuming it’s one of those old Thinkpads. Also, though, if you’re on Debian; they deblob their kernel already and put the blobs in separate packages so they can be optionally used. Don’t install any blobs and you’re good.

I agree. The only feature where I’d say it’s weaker feature-wise is it doesn’t have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I’ve done it, but it’s not easy.).

Otherwise, I’d say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it’s been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn’t. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.

I think your Adobe comment isn’t quite right. I have two family members who are professional photographers and use Photoshop; Photoshop is so important to their workflow they can’t give it up just to use Linux. They thus stick with Windows (though one’s work had them using Macs for a bit, so they see it as acceptable).

In contrast, although I sometimes used Photoshop in hobbies (a euphemism for memes), I never used any features so specific to Photoshop that I couldn’t just replace it with a combination of Inkscape and GIMP.

I think the truth is as much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is the best at what it does right now compared to competitors; GIMP 3.0 has a dismal UI and a weaker feature set, and the latter is largely true of a lot of the web-based editors as well.

I’ve been liking my 1st gen Thinkpad E16 AMD. It took a bit of tuning, but the battery life’s decent.

I don’t use the quick copy and paste on my Thinkpad because it’s so easy to accidentally trigger. I use it more often on my desktop, though.

The KMS timeouts almost make me wonder if the graphics chip is snorting some sort of crack.

Just to be safe, maybe try booting a live USB and see what happens. To be very sure, you could even try multiple distro/DE combos on the live disk.

If it’s RAM, it should be easily replaceable on a laptop of that age. If it’s the graphics chip, then it’s probably time to find some other laptop. You can probably still press this to service in a homelab, though.

Maybe post the entire DMESG just in case.

I think a-Shell’s the best thing for that - gives you a nice Unix style shell on your iPhone.

Old isn’t necessarily bad. Also, as far as I can tell, distros are still patching 1.32. Based on my personal usage of LightDM and the fact that the project is still developed (based on commits to main), I’d say it’s more of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” dynamic. As for security, the active development suggests the developers would respond if there was a vulnerability - a big if, considering its last CVE was in 2017.

Personally, I love LightDM - it has just enough features while mostly sticking to its name (I mean, you’re probably using GTK anyway).

I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.

I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.

Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.

This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:

Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉

Honestly, rather than reinstalling, I’d suggest you boot into a live disk and use dd to copy your old disk over to the new one, then use Gpsrted or something to expand your partition. This worked very well when I upgraded the drives for my Debian install - I think it’s been two years since at thid point without any issues.

If you don’t have an extra drive slot, you might need to get an external adapter.