the distros you tried were… adventurous, to say the least, none of those would even occur to me. the my rule of thumb is:

1. fedora - for the newest hardware, you qualify big time, especially if RH was an initial choice for you
2. ubuntu - middle of the road, best for the majority of users, excluding newest or really old hardware
3. mint/debian - for older hardware

everything else is for hobbyists and/or special use cases, not for people expecting to do actual work.

nope

I’m gonna disagree on both counts.

I run fedora on my desktop and a bunch of laptops and have done so for years; I would never recommend it to a beginner, or even do the install and all the laborious post-install steps and then hand it over.

Plasma is closer to a standard desktop paradigm, but it has its stupid choices that aren’t welcome on a laptop - FOUR finger gestures, really? why?! also, it’s way too configurable so it’s super-easy to fuck up something without an easy way to reset it.

so, both the options you mentioned are natural progressions for an intermediate user, someone who started with an easy option like Ubuntu + Gnome, and then progressed because they don’t need the kiddie wheels no more; but not as first distro.

I used to run my stack on macOS and back then I used Catch to grab episodes of shows I was subscribed to via ShowRSS and Filebot to rename and sort the downloaded movies and shows in a Plex-friendly layout; Plex then grabs new additions autmatically, pretty sure you don’t need to rescan manualy.

like most here I replaced that mess with Sonarr/Radarr and eventualy switched over to Jellyfin when Plex introduced one “feature” too many.

everybody recommending mint skipped over the fact that this is a convertible, i.e. has touch. mint/cinnamon/mate isn’t terribly optimized in that regard and is rocking X11, a headache a beginner doesn’t need nowadays. mint is a phenomenal choice for older laptops, but not this one.

with a heavy heart, I’m recommending Ubuntu. it runs Gnome, which is a way more modern DE, runs on Wayland so has solid gestures and touch support, and lastly, it is very beginner friendly. you’ll be able to sort out any potential issue as that’s the most widely used distro and has solutions and tutorials for practically everything.

once you’ve crossed over and gain some experience, you’ll inevitably start banging your head on the ceiling (snaps and such). by then you’ll have enough experience and knowledge to move to something better.

also, a darknet diaries episode.

check out dell latitude 5285/5290 2-in-1. they are Surface Pro lookalikes with detachable keyboards, but with way service-friendlier interior - easy to open and SSD, comms, battery can be easily replaced, whereas RAM is soldered. the screens (12" 1920x1200 IPS mutlitouch) are gorgeous and the hardware isn’t too shabby, kabylake (7xxxu) and kabylake-r (8xxxu), with standard UEFI BIOS so you can install Linux and have SecureBoot even. I can get them locally for $100-150, dependent on config and equipment (even less if they’re without battery and keyboard).

edit: yeah, I misunderstood your idea, I thought you wanted a cheap linux tablet. what you actually want is a fantasy - an ultra-portable device with huge battery autonomy running linux and such a thing doesn’t exist, for any kind of money.

namely, the mentioned dells are twice the heft of a normal android tablet and the battery autonomy is laughable; not only is it not an improvement over a normal laptop, it’s likely to be worse, as that thing’s essentially a laptop with extras, like touch, gyros, etc.

then comes the real hammer - touching the thing. Gnome and Plasma (and their derivatives) have touch support but if you’re coming from an android or iOS tablet, that support is in its infancy. it’s crude, inconsistent, flaky, and not very well propagated throughout the system. it’s way better than it was a few years ago, but this is not something you’ll want to hang your career or education on.

you can tweak the thing into something semi-usable, and for the price (around $100) that’s a worthwhile endeavour and cute hobby project. it bears repeating, it is not daily driver material, and that includes way pricier solutions - saw a Ryzen 6-series the other day for like $700; everything I’ve written applies to it as well.

this right here. remove partition and apply and then start the installer. there is a way to map this partition in the installer, but that’s such a horrific UX mess that it’s a challenge even for experienced folks.

you can still run both tools, I do so on my main workstation. they stay in the status bar and don’t bother you none. when you’re done working and recline on your sofa, you can send e.g. youtube videos to the rig and they play fullscreen by way of mpv.

I’ve gone the other way - there is no interacting per se with the media PC; instead, it’s a dumb sink that plays back everything you send it, by way of macast and jellyfin-mpv-shim. you use android apps to send it stuff (e.g. newpipe share to allshare which connects to macast and jellyfin android app which connects to JMS) and to control playback (pause, skip, change subs, etc.). so, all media selection and playback control is done from the mobile device, no need to touch the media PC doing the playback.

not sure this will fit into your use case because of spotty internet, but that should prompt you to install jellyfin post-haste. then you have two options, the mentioned android app + JMS or just the jellyfin media player which can run in TV mode with a pared down controller (up/down/left/right/enter/back) - I’ve successfully repurposed an ancient Apple Remote that has just those six keys.

not to trample on your experiences, but you can make it work. it’s true it’s super cumbersome and involved though.

I’ve had/got it working on a T420s, T480s, T14, MBPr 2012, on debian, fedora, and arch. it helps if it’s not your primary/only workstation so you can tweak it without pressure. keep at it, it’s worth it, I can’t imagine using my laptops any other way.

maybe do I write-up one of these days.

you should enable suspend-then-hibernate instead. laptop suspends normally and if not woken in, say, an hour, the RTC hibernates it to disk.

correct, no idea how I managed to do that.

you’re overcomplicating it. get a separate $20 SSD and install the OS to it, dicking around with wine and tools within virtualbox is a headache you don’t need. set it up as desired (I recommend using flatpak versions of lutris and friends because of freshness) and then install the games one by one, followed by transferring the game data/settings/etc. you can experiment to your heart’s desire because you always have the fallback solution of your original drive.

then, when you know what’s what and where’s what you can make the transition. good luck!

I mean, OK, it’s a vulnerability and there are interesting implications, but this is hardly significant in any pracitcal sense of the word.

the potential victim has to run their system without a firewall, has to print to the printer they’ve never interacted with before and then the attacker can run shit with whatever the printing system’s user id is, which shouldn’t be an issue on any reasonably modern distro.

I routinely remove cups and friends from any system I run because I have no need for printing and it bothers me to see it constantly during every system upgrade.

https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm

friend should nuke this crapware and use syncthing for such activities. if they happen to run jellyfin, they can use it to serve books as well, and by utilising the OPDS plugin it would allow compatible readers (e.g. Librera) to directly download books/comics to the device in a shop-like interface.

I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.

anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.

awesome! now onwards to romsfun, 1337x, etc. and figure out how to install, transfer, archive, etc. then you get to upgrade the disk and so on, barrels of fun await!

sure, that’s also viable. I just never had the console experience, so was inclined to share.

come to think of it, I tried it a few months back but it was pretty slow (tried RDR1 on a R5 5600/RX 570 with Fedora 40 KDE). supposedly it’s way better now