grml-zsh-config is its name, and it’s always one of the first things I install on a fresh system. I’ll never understand why it isn’t the default.

Automating updates is generally frowned upon, that’s when things can break. But waiting to run updates until you feel like it (instead of daily) is totally fine. I’ve been using Arch and its forks for years, and have always updated once a week unless something was wrong.

It isn’t recommended, but dpkg will install it if you really want to. You just need to handle dependencies manually.

But it’s a pretty rare issue. If something isn’t available in the official repo, AUR probably has it.

If you’re comfortable, you’re fine. Anything more would just be to speed up the rebuild, so it’s less important if you don’t mind taking the time.

It does, but it’s done me wrong a few times so I never recommend it. For all I know it’s fine these days, but old grudges are hard do shake.

For laptops, I’ve been using EndeavourOS lately. All of the Arch goodness, but with an easy installer that handles the DE too. It’s as close to “just works” as you can get while still having pacman + AUR at the end.

I still love raw Arch, but I leave that for server installs.

My daily driver right now is an old Lenovo Ideapad (50-70 I think) with EndeavourOS, I have a few other assorted Thinkpads and Ideapads running mainly EOS or Arch, and home servers running Arch. I use Arch btw.

The “backup” laptops are flexible though, I distro-hop on them fairly often. Older Lenovos are usually great for Linux compatibility.

EndeavourOS is it. It’s basically a better version of archinstall, especially if you’re planning to install a DE.

I don’t know about an hourglass specifically, but there are some options. Should be in system settings, applications, launch feedback and/or busy cursor.

Arch or EndeavourOS, depending on the machine’s purpose and my mood at install time. I prefer rolling release, and pacman + AUR is a lovely combination.

And for a bit of extra clarity, they’re only changing the default DE. EndeavourOS gives you several DE options during install, KDE will just be on top of the list now (and used on the live media)

I’d call that a downgrade from CLI pacman and yay (AUR). They’re already simple to use.

If we want to get normies into FOSS and Linux, we’d be much better off supporting something like Mint. It doesn’t have the same name recognition (yet), but it’s even more beginner friendly and operates more like a typical distro. Sure Ubuntu is fine, but it’ll teach newbies stuff the Canonical Way.

You should be fine on basically anything. I have a similar-spec machine running Arch with KDE and it’s rock solid.

Mint is always my recommendation for a Linux beginner. It’s the most “it just works” distro I’ve ever messed with, and has plenty of documentation for anything you’d need.

As for advice: I know you want to avoid the CLI, but try to poke around in there and learn it some. Once you get used to it, you can accomplish a lot of things even faster than through GUI applications.

Both, but consumer is generally worse. For reference, check here for issues related to yours. The instructions are geared toward Arch, but the problems affect most distros.

Proprietary BS, Dell has become kinda notorious for that. A lot of their stuff has weird hacky workarounds to get Linux running properly. Unfortunately there isn’t a great way to know that in advance, other than poking through wikis or asking around.

For most computers, it really isn’t much different than installing Windows. Most things will just work, maybe a few drivers to install, and you’re good to go.

That works to get it going, but it’s flaky. The older Broadcom chips need either the old reverse-engineered driver, or the old closed source driver Broadcom released.

Basically anything should work, I had one for a while running Arch + KDE. Wifi doesn’t work out of the box (thanks Broadcom), but once you install the right driver it’s perfectly fine.

If the computer is modern enough that you’d consider buying it to use, I can almost guarantee that you’ll be fine to run the latest distros. I just threw Arch + KDE on a 14ish year old laptop I found, and it runs so well that I may daily drive it for a while just for the hell of it.

At worst, you may need a lighter-weight desktop environment (DE) than some of the pretty ones you see in screenshots. And those are simple to install and try out.