I think your Adobe comment isn’t quite right. I have two family members who are professional photographers and use Photoshop; Photoshop is so important to their workflow they can’t give it up just to use Linux. They thus stick with Windows (though one’s work had them using Macs for a bit, so they see it as acceptable).

In contrast, although I sometimes used Photoshop in hobbies (a euphemism for memes), I never used any features so specific to Photoshop that I couldn’t just replace it with a combination of Inkscape and GIMP.

I think the truth is as much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is the best at what it does right now compared to competitors; GIMP 3.0 has a dismal UI and a weaker feature set, and the latter is largely true of a lot of the web-based editors as well.

I’ve been liking my 1st gen Thinkpad E16 AMD. It took a bit of tuning, but the battery life’s decent.

I don’t use the quick copy and paste on my Thinkpad because it’s so easy to accidentally trigger. I use it more often on my desktop, though.

The KMS timeouts almost make me wonder if the graphics chip is snorting some sort of crack.

Just to be safe, maybe try booting a live USB and see what happens. To be very sure, you could even try multiple distro/DE combos on the live disk.

If it’s RAM, it should be easily replaceable on a laptop of that age. If it’s the graphics chip, then it’s probably time to find some other laptop. You can probably still press this to service in a homelab, though.

Maybe post the entire DMESG just in case.

I think a-Shell’s the best thing for that - gives you a nice Unix style shell on your iPhone.

Old isn’t necessarily bad. Also, as far as I can tell, distros are still patching 1.32. Based on my personal usage of LightDM and the fact that the project is still developed (based on commits to main), I’d say it’s more of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” dynamic. As for security, the active development suggests the developers would respond if there was a vulnerability - a big if, considering its last CVE was in 2017.

Personally, I love LightDM - it has just enough features while mostly sticking to its name (I mean, you’re probably using GTK anyway).

Virt Manager does have snapshots as well.

As for the host system directory mounts, you got me there. There seems to be an option in the Virt Manager GUI, but it is kind of difficult to get working.

I’ve never used Virtualbox on Linux - it was what I used back when I was on Windows.

Yes, I’ve unmounted an ISO image plenty of times. The button, in my opinion, isn’t that hard to find.

I don’t agree. I’m pretty sure Virtualbox has its own weird kernel module instead of KVM.

In addition, I’m pretty sure the the Virt Manager GUI has most of those features and is in general pretty easy to use.

Virt Manager GUI is my preferred.

This isn’t quite Debian red - more of a mix of reddish pink and purple, which is common in Ubuntu backgrounds.

Despite the Debian logo being red, Debian has tended towards blue-ish backgrounds for several versions.

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.

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.