SeikoAlpinist

• ZenWalk was unique and great about 15 years ago as an easy Slackware with minimalist install.
• Chakra Linux was an Arch+KDEmod distro that kind of went away.
• Bodhi Linux has its own desktop called Moksha.
• There is a GNUstep Live CD that comes out every few years, based on Debian. It is a unique setup from a time when the future of computing was promising. I think it is distributed on LinuxQuestions or some other forum.
• There was a distro called gOS about 15 years ago that used a lot of desktop widgets and Google apps. Their business model was basically, "We are going to re-skin Ubuntu and call it gOS and hope Google buys us." It did not work out.
• Darwin was upstream for macOS and for many years, there was a community of users who would port the traditional *NIX stack to it. Xorg, traditional window managers, a ports system, etc.
• Frugalware Linux was well polished and kind of a spiritual successor to Zenwalk.
• openSUSE 10.3 had the most beautiful Gnome setup. It was unique in that it had a single panel, a modified Clearlooks theme, and a Vista-style start menu.
• OpenSolaris likewise had a very unique and beautiful look, with its macOS-inspired Nimbus theme. I think this was the best looking theme of that era.
• SimplyMEPIS was my first Linux on a T61. I had used FreeBSD for the decade prior. I don't know what was better about SimplyMEPIS than Debian, nor do I know what SimplyMEPIS meant versus regular MEPIS. It's kind of like Claws Mail and Sylpheed Claws. Some times we just throw words together and give it an icon and there it is.

I used all of these at some point.

I used to prefer ThinkPads but I've moved on. I have had lots of reliability problems with them over the past few years. I had keys fall off a newer ThinkPad keyboard (which wasn't user replaceable) and another new ThinkPad just die under warranty and the repair person damaged it further when trying to fix it.

I am on System76 now and have no issues and they do good things like right to repair and Coreboot.

If I had to choose a single laptop for everything, it would be the Toughbook 40. I have one for work and it has a 1200 nit display. It runs Ubuntu LTS perfectly. It costs several thousand dollars new but has swapable components, multiple batteries, and part availability is measured in decades. You can get an older CF-31 or CF-54 for a few hundred dollars and still find new components for it.

Endeavour sway edition was great at this.

Mess with the best, Die like the rest.

Debian.

If you want to try something different, maybe LMDE.

• MS-DOS 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11
• Red Hat Linux 5.2
• Slackware Linux 3.5
• FreeBSD 3.2 -> FreeBSD 6.0
• Kubuntu 6.06
• Linux Mint Darnya
• Arch Linux with KDEmod and oss4, later with awesome window manager
• Fedora Leonidas, Constantine
• Microsoft Windows 7
• Fedora Goddard, Lovelock (this time with KDE)
• OpenBSD 4.9 -> OpenBSD 7.0
• Debian stable (buster, then bullseye, now bookworm)

I left OpenBSD reluctantly when I found that it wasn't meeting my needs anymore. I needed an iPad Pro and an iPhone to fill in the missing functionality and they don't play nice with OpenBSD for things like transferring files, photos, etc.

I've since converted the family to Debian stable. Backports and flatpak make it incredibly reliable. We can do everything from here and its well documented for every use case. Video chats, zoom conference calls, file sync/sharing, bluetooth music through Spotify, etc. Started with buster when it was the stable distro; jumped early to bullseye during the freeze; and now holding onto bookworm.