data1701d

Debian is on the right track. XFCE might work - I remember it running pretty well on a laptop with 4 gigs.

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn't be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I'll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

Let's just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

I'm not sure about NVIDIA drivers. Otherwise, it depends on what kernel your distro is using; if it's Debian, there's a chance you might have problems, though you could install the backports kernel, which I do on my Thinkpad E16.

I think it wasn't actually Stallman - it's a common misattribution.

Depends on your hardware and distro. Might not be so bad assuming it’s one of those old Thinkpads. Also, though, if you’re on Debian; they deblob their kernel already and put the blobs in separate packages so they can be optionally used. Don’t install any blobs and you’re good.

It's mostly a breeze. The only misery I can recall is I remember I had a wonky knockoff Arduino board that kept jumping serial ports, but that was a hardware issue.

I agree. The only feature where I'd say it's weaker feature-wise is it doesn't have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I've done it, but it's not easy.).

Otherwise, I'd say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it's been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn't. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.

Coolio, but I won’t be using it at least until it hits Debian Testing. Hopefully this can be in Trixie - looks like the freeze hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t know that I’ve used enough handheld Linux devices to say. The only major one was I had Debian on my Surface Go 1. Power management never worked quite right - after a few suspends, I’d get these weird graphics glitches and have to reboot.

Also, I kind of hated the keyboard- it wasn’t very sturdy and often flexed, causing accidental trackpad clicks.

I still have the device, but when I need a portable Linux machine, I just go to my Thinkpad these days, which other than installing the backports kernel for Wi-Fi support and then adjusting the modprobe.d entry because it was Realtek pretty much just goes brrrr - even my desktop gave more of fuss, as I used to be in a room without ethernet and needed a card that worked with Windows, Linux, and Hackintosh (from before I got rid of my Windows install and my Hackintosh SSD conked out, leading me to switch to virtualization).

He also is oddly enraged about Debian including slightly old versions of Xscreensaver in stable. I get his reasons - dumb people will submit bug reports for things that might already be fixed - but also, Debian has a promise to keep and is well within their rights since the software is FOSS.