Wanna get something like this and a large SSD going forward. Make a silent NAS out of it, and have it in my bedroom without issues.

Pi’s are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.

Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.

Aren’t laptops typically very energy efficient? Low consumption converts to high battery life, which is a priority for laptop hardware.

Some of them consume less than 10W.

Took me good 10 seconds to decipher this

I’ve used Debian for like half a year and this happened to me once, and to my buddy once as well.

Had to su

But why would someone use sudo to invoke su is out of my understanding.

Put Windows and Linux on two separate physical drives and this will never happen

Raspberry Pi?

Buy all you want, sell and you’re fucked.

Alpine HQ

That’s a valid concern; however, there is a clear benefit to making a full ecosystem. End consumers love it and stay with it, and this might contribute to increased adoption of Linux as a whole. At the same time, plenty of people don’t like ecosystems, myself included, and for us the choice is not going away.

KDE, in my eyes, is in the best shape it’s ever been, and they really can afford to spread development efforts. Besides, new applications bring new developers, which may contribute back to the core.

That’s a valid concern; however, there is a clear benefit to making a full ecosystem. End consumers love it and stay with it, and this might contribute to increased adoption of Linux as a whole. At the same time, plenty of people don’t like ecosystems, myself included, and for us the choice is not going away.

KDE, in my eyes, is in the best shape it’s ever been, and they really can afford to spread development efforts. Besides, new applications bring new developers, which may contribute back to the core.

This is always a tradeoff.

KDE tries to be universal and useful for everyone. No matter what you plan to do with your system, KDE has convenient tools for that. But, no matter how they try to make the system less busy, full set of easily available functions always stands in the way of minimalism.

Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.

More pleasant to look at

Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.

User-friendly

Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…

Customizable

Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.

Stable

As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.

In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.

1. Wrong community, maybe? Lol

2. iirc, algae are better oxygen producers per units of mass and volume, so a tank full of algae might actually be better than a tree. One issue though is that trees can grow on open ground, while algae require a tank to be built, most likely negating the economic benefits. Also, trees are more aesthetically pleasing.

Honestly, on my Fedora I have to fix things more rarely than in Windows 11. Granted, Linux troubleshooting is sometimes more time-consuming, but I haven’t met a single issue that would take hours to resolve in a long while. Ironically, my partner wasted about 6 hours recently getting Windows 11 to work with audio devices on a remote desktop client.

Still, we have to admit fixing some stuff in Linux is complicated enough to be outside the scope of regular everyday user.

Nice as a starting point, but not enough features to make it worth it for advanced setups.

OnlyOffice crashed for me repeatedly on Debian, LibreOffice did not.

But otherwise yes, I prefer OnlyOffice as well for a much friendlier interface.

LibreOffice just commonly puts mundane parameters God knows where.

Same for Dell; moreover, KDE actually features the respective indicators, so the laptop feels completely Linux-native

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Can’t say for TeamSpeak, but will say for Linux: setting everything up and figuring out your steps in edge cases is the hardest part. Once you figure it out, it gets so much easier.