Eugenia

Try the free version of OndSel instead of freecad. It’s freecad, but sensible.

If you need games, use the OS that gives you these games. And if that OS gives you headaches, you need to decide if you want games, or a working OS. Maybe you can’t have both always. Or maybe an XBox or PS5 is a better option for you.

I’m an artist and I need photoshop. Adobe is evil, but Photoshop just works. But I still stayed with Linux. Now I use a combination of Gimp and Photopea. While Photopea is 90% there to what I need, Gimp is a disaster in terms of usability (I’ve been using Linux since 1999 btw, off and on, so I’m not new on Gimp). But I still stay with Linux, because it aligns with my beliefs that software should be open. I want nothing to do with corporations injecting tracking or ads on my OS.

I go as far as using a Macbook Air because I like the how its trackpad feels, but I don’t always run MacOS. Most of my actual work happens on Debian on my other computers.

As for Fedora, for games you might want to try Nobara, which is based on Fedora. The default Fedora might, or might not have everything setup for you to run games at higher speeds or compatibility. Running Windows games is not Linux distros’s first priority you see, but Nobara’s is.

I have the same problem with an older macbook air and linux, and I bought a new SSD for it (will be here at the end of the month, since it’s a special pre-ssd model). Husband, who’s an engineer, said that such hard freezes are usually the ssd’s fault, and not the memory’s (he said memory creates other kinds of crashes, but not this kind of hard freeze).

Video calls are not supported under Linux afaik, since they don’t enable it for the web version.

The “unknown” is Windows. If you change the graph to see the whole range from 2008 to date, you will see that whenever there’s a big spike or dip on Unknown, it’s the exact opposite for Windows.

I love Mint because it really is the best option for new users, however, they seem to be a bit of control freaks. I posted a comment on their latest blog to ask if they could include their data about the number of downloads per month, since they installed a tracker on their site in March. They only included the numbers of the first month, and then nothing. I simply suggested that they could have that data as part of their monthly blog update. They deleted my comment. Sometimes they give me vibes of Gnome’s non-transparency, or at the very least, control freakiness.

I had some chromebooks from 2014 to 2019, and these specifically worked with the MrChromebox’s firmware. There’s a list on his website about the models supported.

A bunch of older Chromebooks now running a Free firmware, and Debian.

Microphone doesn’t work yet, if you’re doing lots of facebook calls, it won’t work.

You need something like DamnSmallLinux, not Debian. Debian users about 800 MB of RAM with XFce, on a clean boot. It requires a minimum of 2 GB with a modern browser (one tab, 4+ GB with more tabs). DamnSmallLinux uses about 128 MB RAM on a clean boot, and with the Netfront browser about half a gig. Definitely better for such a laptop than any modern distro.

The tricky point to your needs is getting the app’s menu bar in the top bar. The rest are easy to do with almost all desktop environments. But getting the menu bar on the top bar, I think currently only KDE supports it (with a plugin), and MATE (with another plugin).

However, if you want the general feel of how MacOS 9/X feels, then Gnome with extensions would be your best bet. The rest feel more like simpler Windows, but in a mac skin. Gnome+extensions feel more accurately like a Mac, in terms of overall usability (even if the looks aren’t 100% there). So it depends what you’re after more: the feeling of using a mac, or the exact looks of it.

This looks like a hardware issue to me.

That’s fast enough to run the latest Linux Mint with Cinnamon. I have two laptops with the exact same cpu speed (passmark score) and 4 GB of ram. With 2 GB swap file you will be in business.

I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it’s more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.

It’s not false information. There are a lot of system-oriented things that don’t work through appimages or snaps or flatpaks, exactly because they’re sandboxed.

Do you mean a flatpak? Flatpaks are notorious for not integrating. Try to see if hidamari is available first as a .deb file in the official repos (uninstall the flatpak first). If that’s not it, then it seems that it doesn’t work with the Cinnamon desktop, which has control over the wallpaper functions.

I like best Gnome with modifications, not vanilla. A permanent dock as per “Dash2Dock Animated”, and the “Hide Top Bar” extension, so when an app gets maximized, both the top bar and the dock get out of the way. Also, disabling tap-and-drag via dconf (I really don’t understand why this is enabled by default on most Linux DEs, it’s extremely bad for usability), and enabling the min/max/close buttons via Gnome Tweaks. Other tweaks I like is the Bibata Modern Ice mouse cursor, and the Faenza icon theme. The rest are ok by default for the most part. It’s better than MacOS for me.

Second best gotta be Cinnamon, using the Cinnamenu menu extension, not the default menu. Overall, they’ve thought of almost everything building this DE and its settings. For those who want the best “Windows” could ever be, Cinnamon it is.

Third is XFce. It’s overall good, but it has some things that trigger me: no user admin app, no ability to turn off tap-and-drag (it just doesn’t turn off no matter what you try), and on Debian at least, the machine doesn’t go to sleep without asking for password (requires a policy-kit manual change). Its biggest advantage is that it’s lightweight and I use it as lot for old machines.

I find the rest under-par. I don’t like KDE, and I have thought long and hard why I don’t. It’s not how KDE is structured or works. KDE in fact is fine as a DE! Very powerful. It’s the Qt toolkit that bothers me. When an app loads, it kind of loads in chunks. It doesn’t blast everything rendered in the screen to feel smooth and modern, it kind of renders it as it reads it. And this just bothers me in a UI more than anything. Another thing I dislike is the long right-click menu on the desktop (same for Cinnamon btw).

MATE is nice but it’s just buggy. You setup your panels one way, you logout, you login back again, and the items have changed position. Fully reproducible for me under many different distros. Very, very annoying.

LXDE/LXQT, Budgie, etc, are not as developed as I liked them to be.

With 8 GB of RAM and 5500 CPU passmark points, that’s a good laptop for Linux Mint. Download their “edge” version of Mint, so you get the latest kernel (so it has more chances of supporting 100% that laptop).

I personally don’t have a problem with run0 over sudo, however, I don’t want to have to remember to use a different command on the terminal. Just rename it “sudo”, and do the new stuff with it. Just don’t bother me having to remember new commands.

It’s called a browser? :-)

Honestly, I don’t understand people downloading apps to run things like discord, facebook, spotify, and now lemmy. These are webpages, and were designed to work as webpages. So, best would be to use a web browser.