i think gnome, suitably configured, is a great choice for a basic pc or chromebook|box alternative. simple windows, fewer options to get lost in or to screw up, big fat launcher buttons for the one or very few things that’ll ever get run. throw in atomic updates and flatpak only applications, and it’s near perfect for these users.

and if you have a potato pc, read s-l-o-w-e-r

i still make a swap partition (inside the encrypted volume group). if it’s used, great–if not, no big deal, as ssd should keep some empty bits anyway.

i’m not even recommending 8gb laptops to most users anymore… especially not ones with soldered ram that are stuck with only that.

it won’t. ubuntu’s announcement pertains to the extra demands of gnome, their flagship release, and it’s default configuration.

mint doesn’t ship a gnome spin, and cinnamon, mate and xfce are lighter-weight… and mint is not dependent upon snaps, nor is it even configured oob with snap support enabled.

latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows

so use a lighter-weight de (xfce, lxqt, budgie), and don’t go crazy with brower tabs or open applications, and you’ll be ok… like you’re probably already doing now if you’ve got a ‘marginal’ pc.

that’s probably per ‘household’ not ‘per line’ or ‘per person’.

i’ve still got an ‘emachines’ here. granted, nothing inside is original anymore, except the optical with the curved silver bezel. has an am3 board in it now (originally a barton core on nvidia chipset). i keep it around because it has ide ports… and yes, i do use those. had to dig it out twice in the last month.

that’s a different thing. chromium edge has always had the ‘load at startup’ option (enabled by default, of course)… to make ‘loading’ it when you do run it, ‘faster’.

this new innovation will launch the actual browser window, too.

I only had 360kbit/s for a while

they still sell dsl that slow here… and of course the telephone company charges those people even more than they do in town for 20-60mbit dsl or 100-1000mbit fiber.

there’s a few projects for running windows in a container… winboat and winapps are a couple that come to mind. dunno if they’re ready for ‘prime time’ yet. interesting concept, though.

made me look over to the office door to see if it was the same as the one i’ve had up here for over twenty-five years…

You ate them already. Sorry.

yup. several packages worth. no wonder they were closing them out at something like $2.00 a bag awhile back… they knew

my first install of debian was before it had names. my most recent was last tuesday. i’ve strayed for short stints, but debian is where it’s at. i do have a couple ‘others’ but they are special setups for specific things.

if you like the deb-based system but want to get away from canonical, trixie is ready to rescue you.

western digital was the parent, they bought sandisk in 2016.

last year they spun-off the flash storage business back into a new entity (also) named sandisk, leaving western digital (‘wd’) with only the traditional hdd business.

the spin-off also included wd’s previous sd card line as well as their popular computer ssd products (which are being re-branded by the ‘new’ company).

someone with a corner office in redmond reminded someone else that shareholders expect to see an immediate return on their $100+ billion ‘investment’ in this shit.

hope you have your motherboard sourced already. lga1200 mini-itx gonna be a tough one to find reasonably priced, otherwise.

cachy is the current ‘flavour of the day’, apparently.

manjaro is arch-based, with different repositories than ubuntu or debian-based distributions. what it offers via the DE’s software ‘manager’ will likely be a bit different.

i use aptitude whenever i want to take a closer look at recommends and suggested packages in a .deb-based system. it’s been my preferred package manager since it was originally released back around woody (deb 3.0)

for games or a mix of games and applications, i would also consider using proton or similar instead of messing around with wine directly on its own.

i use bottles myself, because i just have a few smaller windows applications to set up and it works well-enough for those.