ExtremeUnicorn

That highly depends on what you consider a “beginner distro” to be.

I don’t like the term, because to me, it implies that you have to emigrate from Mint to something else at some point, which is not the case.

It’s not a distro that is supposed to teach you how to do X on Linux systems. It’s just a solid OS with a lot of features that are easily accessible, which does make it suited for starters, yes.

I don’t think you have to or should touch the terminal at any time as a regular user and Mint allows you to not do that, as you pointed out as well.

I understood streaming as on the receiving end, e.g. watching streamed content online.

I would actually rate that as a plus.

While it’s nice to have the ability to run android apps, I don’t think many newcomers expect that.

However, it’s much more likely to find an Nvidia GPU in there somewhere, which works notoriously badly with Wayland.

Also Wayland has scaling issues with lower resolution fullscreen apps and settings.

I’d rather have those things working by default.

As someone who’s been in this for a while, go with Mint.

It’s not a “beginner distro”. You can start there, you can stay there as long as you don’t develop any super niche prerequisites. Even then, Mint can probably do it.

The developers are sane and it’s a popular system that has been in development for years with many tweaks and improvements. There’s a big community around it if you need help/guides.

You just can’t go wrong with it.

I tried it on KDE (or rather, it forced me to after it simply updated to Wayland by default). I tried to set it up correctly, but it just didn’t quite work.

I also need no fractional scaling, but dome software does not honor that anyway (e.g. VST interfaces).

Simply reducing the resolution is a simple fix, also easier on the GPU, but Wayland will not fill the screen and intead just shows the tiny original 1:1 image in the middle.

It may be the future, but it’s unusable for me.

I have a high dpi screen. Upscaling does not perfectly work for me in every program, but simply setting it to Full HD does work and looks fine.

However, when I set it to the lower resolution in Wayland, I have 50% of the display active with black bars all around.

So far, there seems to be no fix for this?

Same thing happens if you start older, lower resolution fullscreen apps (retro games and such).

Why does it say 2026? This is happening right now.

Unfortunately, disagree.

Last time I checked it still had double menus all around the place, not a sign of a “polished” experience.

And since a lot of users still recommend to install the dash to dock extension before doing anything else, doesn’t seem plug & play, either.

There’s a bit of hyperbolism and distortion in that comment.

So first of all, the FSF did not create Libreboot, that was just a coreboot distribution by one (or two) people and I would not call it shitty, it had prebuilt binaries with working GRUB configs for the models supported, even allowing for full disk encryption with a well written guide on how to do so.

Secondly, it’s hard to create a chain of trust without trusing the hardware. As long as the manufacturer remains in control of any part of it, you will get the same situation thay we have now. I would rather use a deblobbed device than wait for obscure security features that provide no real-world benefit to my use case.

However, I think this may not catch on. Hundreds of millions of people use completely outdated phones with spyware of some form on them right now, they simply don’t care.

…because I didn’t want to be a victim of the tech industry anymore.

Seems like a cheap excuse, the law doesn’t say specifically that.

But, of course, manufacturers like to lock down their devices as much as possible. And such laws play into their hands.

Since when is this the case?

Hey, just out of curiosity, which Debian version did you install and when?

The Trixie release shouldn’t mess with your sources at all, just because 12 is being moved to oldstable, you shouldn’t have to do anything.

You wrote that you run a headless server, so when you command an update, it lists you all obsolete packages with a request to run autoremove. Did you miss that or update some other way?

Worst case, if you got a new kernel (200-300M) every week and never removed old ones, you’d end up with 10G obsolete data a year. That’s about what I usually see with old Windows update files in the disk cleanup utility.

Not great either, but at least in the default configuration, Ext4 leaves a 5% reserved space, so that files can’t fill up your partition and make it unresponsive. Windows doesn’t do that…

Backports are specifically tested for the purpose of being compatible with stable, so there should be no issues.

I can’t really comment on what what gaming desktops need, I feel like you could absolutely play games without the latest drivers at all times, but I don’t play any modern AAA games.

If you need bleeding edge software, then don’t install Debian, for sure. Or go unstable with all the potential issues.

Is that not in Backports?