I’m well past the age where distrohopping is “cool” (and I don’t have the time for it anymore). So I take a pragmatic approach to choosing which distro to install on my systems.

• Fedora Workstation on my main laptop because it’s the distro that works better on it, it has reasonably up-to-date software without the hassle and problems sometimes present with rolling releases, and I really like the native GNOME workflow.
• Linux Mint XFCE on my spare laptop because it only has 6GB of RAM (I plan to upgrade it, but it’s not a priority right now) and sometimes I lend it to my mother and nephew, and XFCE is a very easy to use DE. Also, LM is stable and does not cause unnecessary problems, and has support for the laptop’s touchscreen right out of the box.
• Debian 12 LXQt on a netbook which I use occasionally, mainly when I’m feeling like just browsing Gopher and Gemini.
• Debian 12 32-bit headless on my home server, which is just an old netbook I got for free. I have my music collection on it, which I listen to via MPD. It also serves as the main node of my Syncthing setup.

I’ve used many others in the past (Arch, Endeavour, openSuse, Slackware, Slax, etc.), but right now I think that the Fedora-Debian-Mint combo is the best for my needs.

MusicBee for music management. Especially since I ditched Spotify and came back to local music. See, there are two things that I want from a music manager software: good playlists management and the ability to transfer such playlists to a phone or portable music player. Sadly, none of the Linux apps come close to MusicBee (and I think that I’ve tried almost all of them).

Some, like Strawberry, have decent playlist capabilities, but fail when I try to send my music to my phone: either it doesn’t detect it (I’m talking about using the USB cable and MTP) or throws an error when transferring the files. And there are certain bugs that haven’t been solved. Others, like Pragha or Gapless, cannot transfer music. Lollypop is the most acceptable one, but its playlist UX is awful, and is slow AF when syncing with my phone. So, for me, MusicBee is the only software that I truly miss from Windows.

And no, I don’t want to just copy the music using the file explorer. As I’ve said, I rely heavily on playlists, and this method doesn’t work fine for that. For the same reason I don’t use Syncthing.

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but I have a secondary SSD in my laptop that I mount on /mnt/elyssa and in every DE and distro I tried it appeared as a removable drive with the “eject” button. Right now I use Fedora with Gnome and if I install this extension or enable the removable drives option in Dash to Dock, it shows me that drive. Maybe some mount option in Gnome Disks, but since it’s not that big of a problem, I haven’t looked too much into it.

“Updated README”