indeed

Access to “real time” kernel which is useful for drones etc.

Personally, I use KDE on Debian and it works great on my 2011 Laptop.

I just think, especially for a beginner, remembering the ‘under the hood’ commands, e.g. package managers, different preconfigurations of installed packages e.t.c., for such different distributions is probably quite challenging.

As Nobara is Fedora based and Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu/Debian, perhaps stay in this eco system and use some Fedora spin/derivate on the Laptop as well.

Good luck with the transition away from Windows!

Windows -> Ubuntu 10.04 … 11.10, -> Kubuntu 12.04 -> Debian 7 (stable)… 8 (testing… stable) … 12

Yes, usual releases are supported ~ 3 months, LTS versions get support for a much longer period e.g. 6.6 for 3 y, 6.1 for 4 y, 5.15 for 5 y or 5.10 for 6 y.

Two different things. LTS kernels get security patches until their support is dropped.

Yes, but if e.g. openSuSE installs its Grub 2 on top of Ubuntu’s Grub 2, you end up with a different theming. If Windows overwrites the bootloader, the Linux boot options are gone.

No, but somebody else has done it and it is basically like the standard procedure for switching between releases.

It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.

Like my professor used to say: “Implementation is trivial, a trained ape can do it.”

3. There’s a Dropbox .deb and .rpm for linux as far as I can tell, but I cannot attest to its quality or how well it integrates with a given file manager. Cloud accounts are generally well supported amongst the key desktop environments, for which I’d consider Cinnamon to be a part of.

In 2018 Dropbox dropped support for running/syncing on encrypted partitions, in my case ext4 on encfs. Don’t ask me why.

I don’t know if that’s still the case.

If you are using Xubuntu 22.04, it should be possible to switch without reinstallation, as Linux Mint and Ubuntu are binary compatible as Mint uses Ubuntu’s repos and only adds Mint-specific packages in its own repo.

As there are LTS branches, currently 5.4, 5.10, 5.15, 6.1 and 6.6 which will get updates until Decembre 2025/2026, I don’t see the problem.

I guess, the governor is set to performance for a realtime kernel to work properly, thus the CPU consumes more power.

Don’t be scared if this leads to uninstallation of a meta-package.

Then, as I said, removing libgtk2 and libgtk3, specifically, the corresponding packages containing these libraries, should trigger removing everything GNOME/GTK related.

I suppose Fedora works similar to Debian handling dependencies, thus uninstalling libgtk* should trigger removing all GNOME/GTK packages and apps. Removing a metapackage, like it’s probably gnome-desktop, usually does almost nothing.

Edit: You can reinstall the GTK apps you like to use, e.g. Firefox or LibreOffice, later, as the user config files are not going to be deleted.

Edit 2: Maybe I’ve misunderstood: Do you want to keep the GNOME login session an desktop environment but use KDE apps like Kate instead of gedit?

However, with some effort, you can install Linux and turn them into regular laptops.

deleted by creator