Roku Jellyfin app has been pretty good lately, few complaints now!

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

Anti-Cheat is a bitch

Seriously, I don’t know how this one is solvable, to be honest, without major investment and support from the game companies themselves.

performance issues are definitely not universal

Agreed!

Don’t @ me too hard, but I think @luciferofastora has some good points on sound and anti-cheat. They don’t affect me, mostly because I don’t like PVP games that need anti-cheat, but they represent a huge chunk of the market and I do wish they worked better on Linux. I’m fully on Linux for my daily driver and generally have good experiences, I’m not even considering going back to Windows, I just wish things worked better for everyone.

It looks quite usable, to be honest. I would have loved to use it back then.

Puppy was going to me my suggestion too, before I read that you’d already used it. Maybe try some of the other versions? If you used a Debian- or Ubuntu-based Puppy, you could try a Slack-based one, or vice-versa. Puppy’s organization is a little confusing, in my opinion, but it does give a user some options. You also might try some of the “puplets” that aren’t official Puppy distros but are part of the Puppy family.

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/family-tree.html

I’m fine with this, particularly since you can just tick the box and still access them. Linux Mint is such a good gateway for new Linux users, it makes sense to hide unverified flatpaks until they understand the risks. Plenty of people (perhaps myself included) won’t ever need to worry about unverified flatpacks if their needs are simple and they don’t add much beyond the standard software.

Well done, OP, for realizing it in the moment!

Mint

I definitely found Linux Mint the easiest version to switch to, coming from Windows. All the menus and icons were basically where I expected to find them. I couldn’t have cared less about Wayland support, I just wanted to do basic tasks and for my printer to work, and Mint did that out of the box.

Honestly, this is good advice. It’s much better to keep personal computer activity on a personal device, whether that’s on a ThinkPad or anything else.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Puppy Linux, I had a laptop hard drive fail on me when I was in school and I couldn’t afford a new one. I made it through the last semester booting Puppy Linux from a USB drive. It was no-frills, but it worked.

My life is a little better knowing this fact. 😄

ChatGPT is pretty crap branding too, for the record. They just somehow managed to mainstream it. All the LLMs after it try to have cooler names (Bard, Copilot, etc.) but the kludgy first name is still better known.

Easier said than done sometimes. That’s the advantage of Ubuntu, Mint, etc. — they minimize the number of weird quirks you run into.