it’s probably gonna be plasma6 by a hair over cinnamon on a rolling distribution. as much as people shit on manjaro here and on that other site, it has never broke on me–whether i update constantly or let it go 2-3 months between them.

but if the de and the underlying os are magically compatible, and those and programs kept up to date, never obsolete, and new ones appear for it as needed or desired… then sorry, it won’t be linux… i’m going back to something like 95osr2, 98se or w2k.

none. sounds like you’re cursed to ride the windows train for life.

i’ve been using firefox and its predecessors since the very beginning, all the way back to pre-release navigator.

i do have (and have always had) other browsers installed (using ‘portable’ installations of them, mostly, these days). currently those include vivaldi, opera, librewolf and waterfox. at least one of which is added along side firefox on each desktop (most often also with a firefox dev edition). these are mostly for testing but also to separate specific online tasks into their own browser. the chromium-based ones are used for very specific things requiring addons that don’t work well or at all with firefox.

unless i need to in order to assist a client, i do not use chrome as provided by google, and i do not use edge from microsoft except for its primary function: downloading another browser when i don’t have a flash drive handy with its installer already downloaded and saved to it.

having actually read the policy documents in question and considering the intent and purpose of the changes that mozilla is making, i have no plans on changing my primary browser.

even the old ‘xp mode’ for win7 was just a vm.

i was impressed with cosmic when i gave it a spin here… it has a lot of potential… just still very ‘incomplete’ currently.

used to be one in rhel… system-config-date or something like that.

for linux and the most basic of basic tasks, i’d look at peppermint. it’s what i put on all the old crap here with ‘marginal’ specs that choke on windows. debian stable xfce based. base install is pretty sparse, not even a browser is included initially. a utility pops up after first boot to facilitate installing a browser, media player, and a few other things if you want them, or the entire debian stable repository is also available. one thing of note. with only 2gb ram, it’s gonna be tight, whatever he runs on it.

his use case is screaming for a cheap chromebook, though. so at least consider that instead. an old laptop like that might make someone a nice little pihole or something, if it’s not ready to be put down for good.

i’ve been shutting down linux desktops most every day lately, and turning them on only when i want to use one.

even if you did, stable shouldn’t break itself regardless of how far out-of-date it is, nor will it upgrade to the next release without a little bit of hoop jumping first.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-project-leader-matthew-miller-a-change-of-hats/139422

have you updated the bios yet (latest appears to be v2.9.1) and reset the bios settings to defaults?

right. so basically:

only run on ‘certified’ hardware. greatly simplifies hw support required.

hide all the stuff that gets users into trouble, or better–don’t even have it available at all.

limit what’s installable.

dumb it down.

they’re trying harder to hide that now. as of last year, a sg-based holding company owns a uk-based company which owns the original developer, the software, and numerous regional branch offices.

kinda sucks, because it is a nice program. doesn’t have feature parity with microsoft office, but it’s got pretty much everything that most users need or would want. it’s also horribly slow on lower-spec hardware.

neither. i think i have cinnamon now on everything except the old junk that has peppermint (its xfce there) or is a console-only box or vm.

if xfce is what you want, try a custom install (using dvd1) and just pick xfce instead of the gnome default during tasksel. you will get a few desktop applications like libreoffice and firefox esr, but those are easily removed if you don’t want or want to replace them. using dvd1 as my install source, wired and wireless drivers were set up during install, were available during install, and were ready to go on first boot to xfce (on an am3 pavilion desktop test system).

timeshift should be available.
https://support.system76.com/articles/switch-from-macos-to-popos/#system-backups

kde is, too.
https://support.system76.com/articles/desktop-environment/#kde-plasma

that is the white portion of the diagram.

this is the way. easy. no install. no extra steps. update when you want.

or you can add the ppa that’s listed in the yt-dlp install instructions (scroll down to third-party package managers > apt) and use apt to install it like any other package.