Idk your laptop's specs but I've been running Arch with XFCE on my Thinkpad T400 for a while now and it was decent enough to do college assignments, take notes, watch videos and stuff like that a year or two ago. Debian is also decent nowadays, and heard good things about Peppermint but I have no experience with it.

Truth is, it doesn't really matter as long as you use a lightweight DE like XFCE, lxqt or cinamon. The thing that will inevitably kill older machines is the modern JS heavy web. Youtube and Reddit were really pushing the limits of that old machine sometimes but it struggled through.

Ubuntu in the early 2000s. My dad bought a little netbook that had it pre-installed. I was hooked, I was using Windows XP up to that point and it was something entirely different. My dad was kind of a techie at the time but none of us had any experience with Linux up to that point, still, we got the hang of it rather quickly and Linux had a lot more not so obvious problems at that time.

That's why I'm saying a long time now, Linux is good enough as it is. It has been good enough for a long time. If you give it to people it works. But you have to give it to them. Normal people don't install their OS', as far as they are concerned it's a part of the machine itself. Linux will only take off if it gets pre-loaded on systems as Windows and Mac was/is to this day. I Canonical wouldn't have partnered with some laptop OEMs back in the day and I wouldn't have gotten linux in my hand it maybe would have took years before I got to know linux and I don't know if I would have installed it on my own.

The internet as a whole was much better when websites and services were not designed to cater to kids.

I used to run into updates breaking dependencies, like Gimp not working after an update and such but since switching most my programs to be Flatpaks I had very few issues.

Running any decently sized instance quickly turns from a hobby to at least a part-time job. A thing that you can't just quit whenever is not a hobby and we should be mindful of that.

As a Firefox enjoyer it really feels bad to keep Brave around just to use Teams. Not that I have any problem with Brave just, if a billion dollar company can't be bothered to make a native Linux app that's fine (it's not) but could they at least support the major browsers?

I think there is a disconnect in what you call a feature and what is a design decision. GNOME consciously deviated from the "desktop" paradigm. I'm not saying that's a good thing or everyone has to like it but this is what they did. I'm not trying to nitpick here but I think it's important to see what is actually happening here, desktop icons are not being worked on not because they hate the users and are lazy in implementing things but because there is no traditional desktop. The overall GNOME UI is not made along this line of implementation, instead it has the activities view. Again, I'm not saying you have to like this and maybe it's a dumb way to make a UI, idk, but criticizing it for not having desktop icons is like criticizing MacOS for not having a start menu. It's just not made that way.

I think quite a big problem with KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows. New users then will expect things to behave exactly like Windows when it just can't. That doesn't mean that there are missing features necesserally but that things are implemented differently and the uninitiated user should know that from a first glance.

Overall I get the sentiment. GNOME is different and needs getting used to and does not fit all workflows out of the box. It has missing features that I wish would be implemented but overall I like the direction they took. It's new, different and after a couple of weeks of adjusting I really gotten to like it. I don't really miss desktop icons because I haven't used them in Windows anyway, I personally like to launch my programs from the start menu/app launcher.

People bash the GNOME team for being too strickt with their design rules and implementations but honestly, I like that they have at least a central vision that they are trying to implement. I don't agree with all of them but so far, all in all, I like the direction GNOME has taken since switching to GTK3 and update 40. Things haven't been fast for sure, the road was bumpy and it took some time and several revisions but the fact that such a comperatably tiny team, a lot of them working on this in their spare time, managed to make something that I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows or iOS user interfaces is remarkable.

And Wayland also threw a wrench into everything and required several rewrites to old protocols but we are really getting some long awaited features like the task bar icons are being actively worked on, a lot of window UI enhancements with LibAdwaita, HDR, fractional scaling and more.

That's not really fair. GNOME has been working on LibAdwaita and GTK4 for quite some while to actually have stable and usable tools to make the missing functionalities happen. And they been adding these in a really good rate in the last 2 releases. Until now we really just didn't had the tools to implement a lot of stuff.

If you look across to KDE land, and not to bash on them I love KDE, they've been much quicker to introduce features but then also spent many releases fixing bugs and sometimes completely re-implementing those features to work properly.

I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn't been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.

I don't like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it'll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I'm using from them and it's working out I'm kinda okay with that.

If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I'll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.

Ah, that's interesting. I haven't had that problem yet on other distros but now I'll keep my eye out for it. Pretty annoying if that's case tho :/

Yeah, that's really unfortunate to hear. Gladly I didn't had any build quality issues so I didn't even mentioned that side but you are right in that it's also a pretty important point. Back in the day micro-USB connectors wearing out was a big thing that apple products didn't suffered from but that's been solved with type-c. Other than that I've been pretty lucky with my phones not falling apart on me.

It's a difficult problem but not principly impossible. One potentially good thing about Meta being involved is that if the user base is there, I'm pretty sure Google with their resources and other big tech backing will find a way and incorporate it into their engine.

I kinda like Helix, I just don't really know what's the point of it. Some of the Kakoune bindings are marginally better than the vim default but any efficency I might get with it I instantly lose when trying to re-learn things or getting confused when I hop on a vim terminal on an other machine.

Kind of the same with the editor, it's like a 'batteries included vim' but I can just get that with a really light vim config and not mess up my workflow.

I guess it's might be cool if you are getting into it as your first modal editor but even then, if you want to use other stuff or need to use some different tools getting a vim extension will probably be easier than getting a Kakoune one.

I love Fedora but since they are no longer shipping the most popular media codecs on install I can't recommend them for beginners. I myself was a bit blindsided by this when wanted to start watching a movie with family and had to scramble to download the codecs 😅

Samsung A50, the cheapest smart phone I could find 5 years ago and it's still going strong. I really don't get the flagship phone craze. I, as I think most people, only use my phone to browse the web, check emails, sometimes watch a youtube video and well, phone people. This little guy has been perfect for that and has no sign of getting slower. The battery still easily gets me through a day with music listening (love the jack btw), web browsing and even some light GPS use.

Not gonna lie, I sometimes miss having a good camera with me, but after buying a half decent DSLR I'm still at or a bit below what a flagship costs nowadays.

When this phone dies a couple years from now I'll probably just get the new cheapest phone in Samsung's lineup lol.