Sad to hear. I don’t know if it’s luck or something else.

I’ve been running Debian on btrfs on my laptop for 3 months without issue; I still use ext4 on my desktop, as I just went with defaults when I installed the operating system.

Based. I find Desert Moonrise kind of vile. I don’t hate painting, but the colors look too Ubuntu.

1: Agree, mostly. I bought a Thinkpad E16 for its Linux support, though I accidentally got a Realtek one that had few bugs that I’ve since ironed out. My only thought is if you own existing hardware that is still usable, it is worth your time at least trying.

2: I somewhat agree. On my note taking laptop, I go by this philosophy. On my desktop, though, I theme away and still get lots done.

3: I sort of agree with you; I think like you said, if you have one drive for each OS, you won’t have problems - dual booting is fine. I’ve got 2 internal drives in my Thinkpad, though honestly, I hardly use the Windows one. I remember 2 partitions being livable on my Surface Go, but again, I barely touched Windows, so I don’t think it had much chance to bork the bootloader.

4: I agree on the Arch and Gentoo part - after trying to use Debian Testing on several laptops, I found rolling release just isn’t conducive to a no-frills productivity device. Honestly, though, I don’t see that much problem with immutable, especially if you go with Flatpak. I also think any stable distro you like should work so long as it has a backports kernel - I’m using Debian 12 that way on an E16 and it’s been pretty smooth (besides the Realtek thing at the beginning, but I fixed that months ago).

5: Wholeheartedly disagree, mostly because XFCE was excluded. 😭 I feel like X11’s still not that far off the beaten path. This feeling will probably change when XFCE switches; 4.20 comes out with preliminary support in a few weeks, and my bet is 4.22 in 2026 will have full Wayland support.

6: I don’t totally agree with this either. I feel like when it works well natively, go for the native package. If you’re having trouble, switch to the Flatpak. I’ve actually had problems with the VSCodium Flatpak on my laptop not using system environment by default, though there is a fix.

A weird VCR board game called Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Klingon Challenge. Honestly, I feel like I’d heard of it before, but I was reminded of it in the annotations for “A Farewell to Farms” recently, as it is the origin for the quote, “Experience bij!”

On a funnier note, the character is not Gowron, but is the same actor for some reason.

Here’s a compilation of the camp in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAvGNn20Y8

As well as a bit that compilation missed: https://youtu.be/3_739DxrMOs?t=3344

I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.

I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.

Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.

(Starts Daystrom Institute post on how US OSHA became UE OSHA became UFP OSHA)

Also, half-dead macrovirus infected with a worm put in charge of Starfleet Medical.

I’ve never used MATE - almost always been an XFCE guy since I got serious about Linux.

It was sort of an accident. After a while of using Ubuntu in a VM (including a weird IceWM stint), I tried installing Debian on an old laptop I had sitting around. The first attempt, where I tried KDE, something went wrong with the Network Manager install. At this point, I can never know what went wrong - it’s been years All I know is that I chose XFCE on the second attempt and didn’t have the problems, likely due to coincidence. Still, I stick with XFCE out of satisfaction.

I mean YaST is kind of snazzy, though not enough to pull me from Debian for the moment.

This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:

Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉

Honestly, rather than reinstalling, I’d suggest you boot into a live disk and use dd to copy your old disk over to the new one, then use Gpsrted or something to expand your partition. This worked very well when I upgraded the drives for my Debian install - I think it’s been two years since at thid point without any issues.

If you don’t have an extra drive slot, you might need to get an external adapter.

Can’t be as bad as Earth: Final Conflict - I’ve watched the first season-and-a-half and was sustained at first by plot and then by awe at how shark jumpy it got after Boone died and how alien space baby rapid aged into an adult man and replaced him as the main character.

I like Debian. To save you the misery, though, you should probably just use the OBS Flatpak with it. I used to be a “native” pedant, but these days, I at minimum consider Flatpak a VERY necessary evil, if an evil at all.

Every time I work with a Mac, Hackintosh, etcetera, the 5K upscale of XP Bliss is my default as a joke (except I think near the end of one school year, where I set the background to something from OS 9).

It was even my iPhone background for a while, though right now, it’s a random James Webb image.

Autism has little to do with it - I’m on the spectrum and I have “proprietary” Star Trek wallpapers on all my Linux machines - Ent D and DS9 on desktop, DS9 crew on laptop, Cerritos on that one old Chromebook I installed Bcachefs Debian Testing on for fun once, Borg cube on my Surface…

Now my wallpaper choices and overall Star Trek fandom… you could probably make a reasonable guess on where that comes from. 😉

iPhone, mostly because of family.

I eventually want to jump to Lineage on Pixel, but that’s not an option for me currently.

My Thinkpad has the factory Windows install on its factory-installed drive, but I only booted it once and otherwise never use it. As the laptop has 2 M.2 slots, I just installed a 2 TB SSD in its secondary slot and installed Debian 12 on it right after I opened the box. I nearly always use that install.

I recently had an exam where the spyware test monitoring Chrome extension was mad about me using Linux (I only use Chromium when I have an exam - otherwise I just use Firefox), so I had to use one of the Windows machines in the lab. This was weird, because I’ve taken other tests (including after this incident) that didn’t have a problem.

Back in high school, I had to use a Chromebook and the occasional iMac, though the Chromebook is technically a Linux device.

I need to the h*** give Babylon 5 a try eventually.

Shaka when the walls fell. 😔

I haven’t used both.

It’s mostly Debian-focused, but you should probably use venvs. They allow you to have different versions of Python packages for different applications. I especially like it when using it in combination with pythonz for applications that require a different version than the system Python.

I find they prevent the system Python from being a complete pile of anarchy.

Like others have said, the error tells you everything you need to know.