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.

I like Debian. To save you the misery, though, you should probably just use the OBS Flatpak with it. I used to be a “native” pedant, but these days, I at minimum consider Flatpak a VERY necessary evil, if an evil at all.

Every time I work with a Mac, Hackintosh, etcetera, the 5K upscale of XP Bliss is my default as a joke (except I think near the end of one school year, where I set the background to something from OS 9).

It was even my iPhone background for a while, though right now, it’s a random James Webb image.

Autism has little to do with it - I’m on the spectrum and I have “proprietary” Star Trek wallpapers on all my Linux machines - Ent D and DS9 on desktop, DS9 crew on laptop, Cerritos on that one old Chromebook I installed Bcachefs Debian Testing on for fun once, Borg cube on my Surface…

Now my wallpaper choices and overall Star Trek fandom… you could probably make a reasonable guess on where that comes from. 😉

iPhone, mostly because of family.

I eventually want to jump to Lineage on Pixel, but that’s not an option for me currently.

My Thinkpad has the factory Windows install on its factory-installed drive, but I only booted it once and otherwise never use it. As the laptop has 2 M.2 slots, I just installed a 2 TB SSD in its secondary slot and installed Debian 12 on it right after I opened the box. I nearly always use that install.

I recently had an exam where the spyware test monitoring Chrome extension was mad about me using Linux (I only use Chromium when I have an exam - otherwise I just use Firefox), so I had to use one of the Windows machines in the lab. This was weird, because I’ve taken other tests (including after this incident) that didn’t have a problem.

Back in high school, I had to use a Chromebook and the occasional iMac, though the Chromebook is technically a Linux device.

I’m an XFCE account. I find XFCE to be nice and fast. It’s decently light - not the absolute lightest, but most of its installation size is from dependencies you were going to install anyway like GTK.

For now, it’s still on xorg, but I think they’re working on it.

Usually, I throw college assignments in a folder under documents.

Admittedly, that irks me slightly just because of the shared name with the devices folder in root, but do what works for you.

I don’t know about the hub specifically, but I have a One Touch portable external HDD that touts some of the same features. I’ve never had any particular problems with it - it’s just a normal USB mass storage device. The “special features” provided by the Seagate Toolkit (not available on Linux) seem like they’re done at the filesystem level.

If you don’t care about encryption, it will most likely just work - format it however you like. If you care about encryption, there’s ways like LUKS or filesystems with FS-level support, depending on how much you care about interoperability with non-Linux systems. You might also be able to do something kooky like format it with Bitlocker on Windows, which I think can still be mounted on a Linux system; I was able to access my encrypted Windows partition from my Linux install on my Surface if I entered the key - I’m sure there’s a way to automate that part.

I don’t know. You should make sure it doesn’t have a Realtek Wi-Fi card. Otherwise, it looks fine. I found the Linux Hardware report for it here: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=7144bb41

I think the price to performance doesn’t look the best, though. Maybe go for a Thinkpad instead?

Reminds me of how my SSDs (both literally brand new) kept spitting out error messages in smartctl. As it turned out, this was a smartctl bug and I was able to install the Debian backports version to get a version with the fix.

Yeh, I think it has to do with some CPU topology crap. I have it working pretty well, luckily - I once had an old Virtualbox VM with MacOS that I needed, and I was able to boot it in my Windows VM.

With Lightroom, you’re right on that. Honestly, the state of FOSS image editors is a bit ridiculous, especially considering how good FOSS vector editors like Inkscape are these days compared to their commercial, proprietary counterparts.

I can see that. I nuked my Windows partition years ago, though. Honestly, if I find a software is jerk enough to block virtualization, I don’t find it worth using.

I personally use LUKS + clevis with a TPM on my Thinkpad.

Something like that. In my setup, I passthrough my RX 580 (my nicer card) and have my RX 550 (a dirt cheap one I got for ~$85 on sale) stay connected to the host.

I would almost recommend GPU passthrough if you have a dual GPU system and can figure it out. It definitely takes a bit of tinkering, but I like the results: I now have both a Windows 10 (maybe will become 11, maybe 11 LTSC) and a Hackintosh VM. It’s not as good if you only have one graphics card, through. If you’re up for it, I used this tutorial. If it’s an AMD card, though, make sure to check my issue for any steps relating to that.

As for dual boot, get a second drive if you can. I find it helps me avoid a lot of the misery, although I very rarely actually boot up Windows anymore - just a VM if I really have to (which I do for MATLAB because my university is ridiculous and I figure if I’m going to use an evil programming language, I might as well use it in an isolated, evil environment).

I might recommend a 2-in-1 Thinkpad. I can’t speak for all models, but my 1st generation Surface Go brought me misery when running Debian Testing on it - power profiles weren’t supported quite right and the camera was hard to set up.

If you have the budget, the Star Lite seems pretty nice as a Linux tablet, although you should do your own research - I don’t own one. Personally, I have a Thinkpad E16 for college.

I find that I’ll do the bare minimum in GIMP (like that one healing extension), and then I’ll copy what I have over to Inkscape to do the rest.