Gone too soon. So sorry for you loss.

With Japan, they only have so much inhabitable land anyway. It’s a mountainous island where all viable land is already pretty much taken.

Librewolf, which is great, but I have been desperate for alternatives for a long time now. I also use Falkon and Gnome Web on the side and those are ok, but unfortunately not on the level of Firefox and its ilk. I’ve been considering Waterfox and GNU IceCat also, but honestly the overall situation is depressing. Currently, Librewolf ticks most of my boxes, but every browser has some issue or another that I’m not keen on. I have no idea what the next step is.

Distros packaging software means that it is available to install with the package manager from their repositories. No distro provides every piece of software out there. This can be mitigated with Flatpak, Snap, GUIX, AppImage or, in a pinch, by compiling the required program yourself.

Sounds like you’ve already done most of the work. From what you’ve said, Fedora with Plasma sounds great for your use case. Good luck on your journey and glad to have you aboard!

With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.

Turns out this is also available in Alpine repositories, so I went ahead and installed it on my phone. Could come in handy when browsing from public Wi-Fi or such. Thanks for the tip.

I turn it off every night or if I’m away for many hours, so about 10 minutes right now.

I do have a Raspberry Pi that’s been up 12 weeks, 5 days, 19 hours, 59 minutes. I believe there was a planned power outage when it was lasted turned off.

Yup, Konsole is good enough.

KDE Plasma. It makes sense to me and everything functions more or less how I prefer it to. If I need something, it’s usually easy enough to find. Plasma being flexible is a plus, but I rarely need to do any modifications.

I loathe GNOME. Any time I use it it’s like pulling teeth. On a touch surface I can maybe get it, but on desktop I honestly think it has some serious usability problems cooked in. And since GNOME extensions can break at any time, trying to “fix” GNOME is a losing battle. If I had to use GNOME, I’d install GNOME Classic which is ok. Or better yet, use XFCE or MATE. GNOME is highly opinionated and that’s fair enough, they can do their thing and people seem to like what they offer, but boy is it not for me.

I think he already sent a letter.

After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn’t want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it’s based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that’s a two-edged sword.

Right now I’m content with Tumbleweed, but I’m keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.

openSUSE Tumbleweed has served me well for some time now. Maybe give it a look-see?

The interface is a bit bare bones and 90’s but I like it that way. It’s a good and reliable client.

Can’t help you there, I buy CDs and lossless copies from Bandcamp and Qobuz. Those work for me.

“Install Gentoo” is a meme, not life advice. With Gentoo, the installation process gives you good insight in to the internals of Linux systems and compiling (almost) everything from source is interesting, but won’t produce noticeable benefits for average users. Especially since updates take some time, what with compiling the programs again. Gentoo is a great distro with a fantastic package manager, but unless you’re an enthusiast or a serious hobbyist, Don’t Install Gentoo.

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Mandriva was a Linux distribution that went out of business years ago. OpenMandriva is one of the projects that rose from its ashes with some of the same personnel and code base. It is an independent (not a fork) and community run distribution that, I think, does quite a lot with very limited resources.

Corporate backing is a two-edged sword, unfortunately.

I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I’m more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.

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After Thunderbird’s UI overhaul I jumped around a bit and landed on Claws Mail. It’s fairly old fashioned, but I personally prefer that and find it clear and logical. It’s a good client.