AI is only opt-in

Not to take anything away from your overall point, which I completely agree with, but this may be a bit of a stretch. All of the “AI” buttons and features are - to my knowledge - on by default. They have made it a lot easier to change that to “off by default now and in the future”, which is very welcome, but “only opt-in” is, again, a bit of a stretch.

In my experience (with a networked HP printer), both printing and scanning just work out-of-the-box with the standard Linux tools. CUPS really is great.

That’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight in 2026. However, back in 2021, it was easy to say without the benefit of hindsight.

Thank you for distilling that.

In order to make the kernel option persist, you will have to add the option to your bootloader config. Ubuntu probably uses grub, but in any case, I never can remember how to configure any of the bootloaders. Someone here can probably help out (or it’ll be a quick search away, I’m sure).

You would have to do that, yes. In all likelihood, you’ll be fine with just picking a distro. As the Señor says, elementary has a Mac-like aesthetic.

I have no experience with that distro myself, but I’d imagine that it allows running a live environment directly from the USB, that will let you test it without installing so you can see if everything that you need to work will work, and also whether you actually like it (running a live environment from a USB will be slower than if you had it installed, so don’t base your “liking it” off of that).

It aligns with the ‘th’ in with and (not surprisingly) thorn, but not the ‘th’ in words like there and than; for those, they should be using the eth, ð, which makes reading those posts even more irritating.

Also, arch is way less intimidating than its reputation suggests; especially on a secondary PC, where you can just run off to your main PC to look at the arch wiki.

Other than that, I suppose something like AntiX would probably run not-terrible on it as well.

You dropped this [

It’s also on the AUR

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&K=grayjay

I like wlogout, I’ve mapped the power button to launch it.

If your position as a civil servant involves official communication with companies, you’re going to need the § sign a lot on a daily basis, and the Nordic countries have basically always had large public sectors.

slammed into the Martian countryside

At least it avoided the Martian urban areas.

$ cat ~/.config/bat/config

The irony.

It’s in Spanish while being labelled as English.

Nah, rollbacks are a feature to save you when it has broken. A good one indeed, but it’s more akin to a fire extinguisher. It doesn’t prevent the problem, but it does prevent everything from being a pile of ashes.

Well, OP only specified that they’d been using Linux for about a decade; no mention of their laptops not being from the early 90s. :)

Whatever nebulous issues one or the other may or may not have had, my personal experience is that startpage (from my understanding, basically privacy’d google) provides higher quality search results than DDG (fmu, basically privacy’d bing).

Great operating system, that. Shame it lacks a text editor.

There are people coming from Windows, which does not have dd.