RHOPKINS13

Debian. So many other distros are based on it anyway. I use it on damn near everything now.

I’ll go against the grain a little bit and say it’s a little weird. There’s nothing wrong with liking multiple distros, but a lot of people either stick with RPM-based (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, OpenSUSE, Mageia) or Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Elementary). Then you have weirdos that like Gentoo, where nearly every package you install has to be compiled on the system. Or Arch, where the “installer” throws you in a terminal, and damn near everything has to be done manually to get your system up and running. And updates are “rolling release”, and if you try to update just one package without updating the rest of your system things can easily break.

I am mostly a fan of Debian-based distros myself. But I’ll use CentOS on a VM if I’m trying to self-host anything that recommends it.

At home I always sit. I don’t care how well endowed you are or how well you can aim, there’s always a bit of splash that I don’t want to deal with. In most people’s homes I’ll have the same decency to sit. Nobody wants to sit where someone’s pee has been, or clean that off the floor, etc. At work I’ll usually sit too, let’s be honest I’m probably going to scroll on my phone for a minute or two while I’m at it.

I rarely go to the bathroom in public, I’ll usually wait until I get home. For the few exceptions, I’ll almost always stand. Because some of those toilet seats, especially in men’s bathrooms, can be nasty.

My personal favorite is Debian. I’m the IT director at my job, and 90% of our machines, including end user workstations, are running some form of Linux.

One really nice thing is that most stuff is saved somewhere in your home directory. You can switch between all sorts of distros, and if you install the same software, browser, email client, etc. most of your stuff will automatically be there and work out of the box.

1. Based on opinion, but okay, I’ll give you that one.
2. Ubuntu has terminal built-in, it’s far from hidden. Most Android installs (average smart phone) don’t include a terminal, you have to either use adb from a computer, or download a terminal from an app store.
3. Ubuntu’s root user is not locked down. By default the user can run any command they want using sudo, and a basic google search will tell them how to enable root login fairly quickly. By comparison, just about any android smartphone has to be “jailbroken” using an exploit in order to access root. Some phones, especially in the USA, can’t be jailbroken at all.

Ubuntu is pretty upfront about any telemetry and allows you to disable it easily. A lot of Android’s telemetry can’t be opted out of, unless you happen to have an unlocked bootloader and can install a privacy-focused custom ROM.

These are not the same, although I get the point you’re trying to make. Ubuntu has a user-friendly interface, with a goal of making Linux accessible to all. But for anybody who wants to, it’s fairly easy to dig into the internals and become a “power user.” It certainly makes no attempt to stop you from doing so. Android, on the other hand, on MOST instances, locks down everything, with little to no overrides, even from the user, many times “in the name of security.”

I bought my son a used Surface Pro 4 for schoolwork. Luckily we haven’t run into many problems, but there is a known problem where the processor still runs the battery dead when it’s shut off. You’re actually better off using standby.

If he runs the battery dead, we can plug it in and it will boot, but shortly die afterwards. But if we wait ~15 minutes to charge it a little, it stays on as long as we want it to.

You can pirate without a VPN, just don’t use torrents. All major file hosts (like MEGA, Google Drive, etc.) use HTTPS. Your ISP can see that you’re downloading from them, but they can’t tell what you’re downloading nor whether it’s pirated content. People get busted for torrents all the time, downloading from other places (NOT P2P!)? Practically unheard of.

We’re running Linux on the vast majority of PCs at my job. We used to run Lubuntu, but switched to Debian. You can use pam_mount so user folders are mounted from a server at login, to create a “roaming profiles” environment. But there really isn’t a great solution for laptop users that might be away from the office.

If you do use pam_mount, don’t mount their entire home folder. That will end up throwing a bunch of stuff on the server, like chrome temporary internet files, and their .config folder, that just aren’t needed on the server and will slow everything down. Just mount their individual Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders.

We’re a small business, we don’t have any Enterprise Support or anything like that.

There’s no one “proper” way. Running multiple DEs shouldn’t break anything, but each DE comes with it’s own set of dependencies and other software, so it does add clutter. There will also be considerable overlap with config files, so if you change a setting in one DE, it could change settings when using another DE.

Having a separate user account per DE will prevent most of the configuration overlap, but it doesn’t solve the abundance of packages you’ll have installed from having multiple DEs. I don’t think there’s a great “clean” way to do it.

One thing I love about Linux though, is how relatively flexible the user home directory is. When moving to a new distro or PC, usually everything you need to copy over is within your home directory. For what you’re trying to do, I’d consider throwing /home on a separate partition. That way, you can try out multiple DEs and distros, without blowing away your home folder. And you’d be surprised at how small your root partition can be, the vast majority of your storage should likely be reserved for /home. The Steam Deck, for example, uses a root partition that is only 5 gb. On a typical Linux system, I’ve found 64 gb to be plenty for root.

When switching distros and/or DEs, consider cleaning out various config files in your home folder. Almost all of them will be hidden files that have a filename that begins with a period. I only keep specific config files for programs I want to retain data for, like Google Chrome (.config/google-chrome), Thunderbird (.thunderbird), and Steam (.local/share/Steam). If you use SSH keys you’ll want to keep your .ssh folder too. But deleting all other config files will give you a pretty clean start when changing DEs.

Try installing Linux on it. Check out AnLinux. I’m running Debian with KDE on mine.