When I first installed Gentoo, it was because it was one of only around three distros that supported x86_64 at the time. Yes, that was a long time ago.

I’ve kept it as a daily driver for a number of reasons. First, because I’m a control freak, and Gentoo goes out of its way to allow me to select exactly the packages I want, and gives me access to all the knobs and switches that other distros may hide in the name of user-friendliness.

Second, because once installed it’s surprisingly solid and trouble-free—Portage is an excellent (if slow) package manager that, judging from what I’ve heard from people running other distros, is better than the average at preventing breakage, and since it’s rolling-release there are no whole-distro upgrades to complicate things. I ran one system on rolling updates for 17 years without reinstalling, and it was still pretty much up-to-date on all packages when I retired it back in March—try that with Ubuntu. (The replacement system also runs Gentoo.)

Thirdly, I’ve been with Gentoo for so long that I know how to create packages, unbork a system that I’ve messed up by doing something really stupid, and various other tricks. If I went to another distro, I’d have to relearn much of that from scratch.

(A fourth reason for some might be that it supports a wider range of CPU architectures than any other distro except possibly Debian.)

Writing a custom GTK3 theme for my own use a couple of years back was an extremely painful process. There’s no list anywhere of the possible themable element types (I had to go through the actual source code to compile one) or the possible nonstandard options (never did manage to compile that list). I haven’t had to look at GTK4 yet, but I doubt it’s any better.

(As for how people use dark themes: put borders on things if you need to, and/or use hover options to distinguish what the active element is.)

The X3D CPUs are very sensitive to overvolting, and some mobo manufacturers had their boards set to overvolt out of the box before this was discovered. Result: fried CPUs.

There is only one X server implementation

That isn’t quite true. There have been several proprietary implementations for non-Linux systems—Apple’s XQuartz was still being maintained as of a couple of years ago, although I don’t know about its current status. Standards documents exist, and anyone can code to them.

Isn’t systemd that open standard though?

No. It doesn’t support BSD, just for starters, even though most of the established desktop environments originally ran there as well as on Linux. So by definition, anything that relies on systemd can’t “support as many systems and platforms as possible”. And to my knowledge, no actual standards document defining protocols and interfaces has ever been published (although I admit, as an OpenRC user, I don’t pay much attention), meaning that the interface can change without warning. If systemd works for you, that’s fine, but don’t try to build it up into something it isn’t.

I expect that would be the problem. Gentoo very noticeably is still only offering up to 48 in the main repo—not sure whether that’s just normal maintainer lag or someone’s trying to patch it.

If I cared that much, I could have bought a blank keycap for an extra buck when I bought my keyboard and banished that thing forever. (I own a Unicomp New Model M 103-key, which only has one Windows key to begin with, and the manufacturer will happily sell you blank or custom-text keycaps. Unfortunately, while they do sell a set that includes Tux keycaps, they’re sized for a 104-key.)

probably uses Discourse… I don’t get why people like that forum software :/

I don’t either. It hates minority browsers even more than Cloudflare does, doubles down on this by using unnecessary bleeding-edge Javascript constructs, and every instance of it I’ve ever seen looks ugly as hell.

I’m not sure what happened to the old Redmond widget theme, which was essentially a transplant of the Windows 9X widget style, but if you’re not picky, the .Net theme in the tdeartwork package will probably be Good Enough (or you could go for the different-but-equally-retro CDE/Motif experience). TDE itself, as KDE3, was originally expected to run on an average PC made 20+ years ago—I ran it for years on a single-core Athlon64 with 1GB RAM (and those were pretty good specs for a machine of that era). I don’t know what else Q4OS might be carrying along with it, though.

If you want to go even lighter, look for something offering Fluxbox or Openbox as the GUI—they have enough stuff in them to be useful launchers out of the box, but don’t have the overhead of the true DEs (configuring them may require you to mess around in text files, but you only have to do it once).

Anyway, your main issue is going to be getting any modern browser to work on a machine that constrained. (If your interest is only in looking at Wikipedia, Konqueror, which ships with TDE, can be made to mostly work if you force the use of Wikipedia’s “vector” skin, but the current default skin breaks search and looks like ass. Konqueror’s browser code is way out of date and not recommended for general Internet use.)

Sort of? In my experience, the people working on WINE have always been more interested in game compatibility. Sometimes other software will work, but it’s a crapshoot.

Gentoo will work if you have the time to work through the install, and stick with provided binaries for large packages (or have a lot of patience with updates).

Gentoo will allow you to update the small set of required system packages and their dependencies separately from everything else (emerge --update system), but doing the reverse would require some pretty heavy micro-management.

There are a lot of command-line tools for text, like grep and sed, that don’t work on binary files. Whether this matters to you depends on your workflow. (I use grep a lot.)

exFAT is a Microsoft creation that (unsurprisingly) doesn’t understand or preserve Linux-style file permissions. Neither did any of the FAT varieties before it. So the permissions on the files when you get them back relate to the mount options you pass to the exFAT drive (in this case, you probably want to set dmask and fmask), or the permissions on the directory it’s mounted to.

If you don’t want to twiddle with mount options, you could reformat the external disks using Linux-native filesystems like ext4, but you’ll lose the ability to mount them on Windows if you do that.

Windows just worked.

Excuse me while I laugh hysterically while remembering the sorts of Windows issues I’ve troubleshot for family or coworkers. The one where the combination of a particular Windows version + a particular MS Office version + document previews being activated would cause Office to crash randomly on operations that had nothing to do with document previews was particularly memorable and difficult to figure out. The various Linux snafus I’ve had to deal with were pretty easy to handle by comparison.

Eh, it’s Ubuntu. They have a long history of trying to reinvent the wheel, getting no traction, and then reverting to whatever the rest of the world uses instead. And Linux is full of incompatible parallel packages that provide the same functionality. It ended up not mattering very much with init systems—why should this be any different, even if it’s the one Ubuntu oval-shaped wheel that catches on for some reason?

Your problem is that you’re starting from the wrong premise: the primary goal of most people working on Linux is not to make more people switch to it, strange as that may sound, it’s to create an operating system that they personally want to use. Which can mean a lot of different things, depending on the person. So it’s inevitable that there are a lot of different distros, and the only reason there aren’t even more is that most of the one-man shows that don’t attract many users peter out and vanish after a few months or years.

Assuming you mean 2GB RAM, it will run a full Linux. I was using a 2008-vintage laptop with similar specs as a secondary machine until recently, and it was capable of handling many light workloads. Retro gaming up to the 16-bit era should be fine. 720p video playback from local storage (never tried streaming) was fine. Modern websites were very hard on it, though, so I didn’t normally use it in that capacity.

Just pick a distro that isn’t too bloated, and a desktop environment that’s suited to older machines and doesn’t expect too much of the hardware, and you’ll be fine.

(My laptop still works, by the way. I gave it up because 1. I got a good deal on a machine with much higher specs and 2. I run Gentoo, and compiling a modern version of GCC on a dual-core of that vintage takes longer than you would expect.)

Actually, it goes to a lot of trouble not to step on the toes of later versions of KDE, and there are people who have them both installed side-by-each without major problems.

-nolisten is an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I’d have to look up the details, as it’s been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.