Sunoc

Oh that’s an actually insightful answer! Thank you!

I don’t really have any issue with KDE, I’ve actually barely used it at all, I was merely trolling. It’s juste the “a lot of functionality at the expense of simplicity “ that doesn’t speaks to me in general. I understand the criticism against GNOME, however I got to really appreciate the effort they are putting in simplicity and integration. Once you get used to do things “the gnome way” , it’s really comfortable imo. I guess the same goes for any DE or WM.

I use Aeon btw, so of course I’m all in for using vanilla gnome!

GNOME is rock solid on my device, unlike KDE. What do you mean by that exactly?

The custom kernel situation looks kinda tricky indeed. What parts are not working without it?

Im considering an old surface go as well

Alpine works great for the desktop and I’m using it myself for my lower end machine.

Working without glibc and with some strangly named packages is sometimes tricky, but so far I have been able to do anything I’d wanted!

If it can help you in your journey, here is my personal configuration for Alpine, with WMs and DEs on their own branches. Only the ‘suckless’ (DWM) and ‘xfce’ are working properly so far: https://gitlab.com/sunoc/als/-/tree/suckless?ref_type=heads

Aeon Desktops it is

Always love to see article of non programmer people using Linux or Emacs!

BODY once…

pfetch anyone ?

As pointed out by @themoonisacheese, immutable distros are getting some traction recently and they are good for making a system reproductible, allowing easy rollbacks, but this should not make a big difference, privacy-wise. It also add some work for configuration / learning. Here are two levels I’m thinking of from what you presented:

• You go with any stable (big fan of Debian here too) so to avoid data breaches from brand new packages (xz…), then you can compartimentize your application with Flathub and manage the rights with Flatseal. If you go with software with less telemetry (Firefox), this should be a reasonable and easy to use setup. The rest of the privacy will depend on what is going on inside of your web browser, probably.

• The next step would be something like Qudes-OS + Tor. If your workflow / usecase allows it, this should be a good step up for privacy. Your laptop seems beefy enough to handle the many VMs, and the install is easy enough imo.

Welcome to the community!

Seconding all the previous comments recommending Linux Mint: since you come from Windows, you’ll probably feel most at home there. It is also possible to do all common tasks without ever opening the terminal.

Mint should run fine on any hardware, but to be most safe, try to use something that is at least 1-2 years old and stay clear from dedicated GPU as first (in particular Nvidia).

I’d also advise that the packaging situation for distributing software in Linux rn is somewhat messy. Thankfully, multiple format (apt, Flatpak) are directly available in the Linux Mint Software Center. In case you need to use some proprietary software (Chrome, Spotify, idk), you’d probably want to go with Flatpaks.

I’m currently running Alpine on my RPi4 as a host for some Dockers, including pi-hole and it works great! The setup is surprisingly painless and you’ll end up with some insanely fast boot time. Highly recommended !

I’ve been trying Librewolf as a Flatpak on my work machine lately and it’s going great! It’s really a no-BS Firefox + privacy settings by default; love it. But in general I keep the default Firefox that come with my distro.

This! And switching to DDG or others if TOR is needed.

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for sharing!