I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.

They also messed up the DS9 theme; it drove me nuts when they sped it up and added that horrible drumbeat that doesn’t stay synced up the whole song.

Reminds me of when a client walked in to the help desk I work at the other day with a 2015 Macbook Pro still running El Capitan. I upgraded her to Monterrey - it’s been EOL for a year, but it’s better than sending her away with El Capitan. Monterrey is the best I can do since OCLP would be outside our policy.

I mostly agree with the idea of using stable distros.

However, I will add that if you hate the default Debian installer and are willing to dig a bit through the website, they do have live USBs for each DE with a Calamares installer that I love. I really wish they would promote those more.

Honestly, they need to redo the whole Debian site.

Also, I find it funny you include 2018 in your range; I think that most things from 2018 could probably run almost any full modern distro competently, and that the better quality devices from 2015-2017 also wouldn’t struggle too much.

Debian with XFCE. It’s very stable with very little bloat compared to Ubuntu.

KDE might not run horribly, but XFCE was always snappy for me when I ran it on a similarly-aged, sinmilar performance Fujitsu Lifebook.

I’ve never even owned a Mac; I know about it because I’ve Hackintoshed a few times, so I’m familiar with OpenCore.

Really? I thought the last version for those was Monterrey and that that went EOL in 2024.

That reminds me; the other day a client walked up to the help desk I work at with a 2015 MBP still running El Capitan.

I’m confused. How did you save your parent’s Masters in Business Administration? /s

(Sorry. I can’t help but think that every time someone acronym’s Macbook Air.)

OCLP?

My rare non-OC, but contextually relevant.

I enjoyed the D & D movie, so maybe they can pull off something good. Maybe they could just do something set in, say, 2467.

However, I’m extremely sad that it probably won’t be Crisis Point 3.

I will point out that the card support for ROCm has improved; AMD explicitly supports most RDNA3 or later consumer GPUs, and I think support might go back to RDNA2, maybe RDNA1.

Supposedly it’s technically possible to use Polaris, but it’s very broken at this point.

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

That’s precisely why secure boot and TPMs exist - the TPM can store the keys to decrypt the drives and won’t give them unless the signed shim executable can be verified; the shim executable then checks the kernel images, options, and DKMS drivers’ signatures as well. If the boot partition has been tampered with, the drive won’t decrypt except by manual override.

The big problem is Microsoft controls the main secure boot certificate authority, rather than a standards body. This means that either a bad actor stealing the key or Microsoft itself could use a signed malicious binary used to exploit systems.

Still, it’s at least useful against petty theft.

TPM sniffing attacks seem possible, but it looks like the kernel uses parameter and session encryption by default to mitigate that: https://docs.kernel.org/security/tpm/tpm-security.html

It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.

Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.

I just want a Lower Decks Vol 1 vinyl reissue and a Vol 2.

That joke’s so funny, it’s making me a bit wheezy…

Didn’t Debian drop i386? Are you running Debian Bookworm?

Personally, Super Star Trek is my favorite terminal game.

Not really.

Ampere’s for servers; if you have the cash to blow, you can get a fancy workstation, but not a laptop. It’s really a shame; I think Ampere might be able to do well in the consumer CPU market if they wanted to face Qualcomm (and assuming they can get their single core performance up). A lot of their hardware seems to follow standards pretty well.

Graviton is only used internally inside Amazon and not sold to customers.

The only semi-decent ARM laptops you can get right now are Snapdragon ones, some of which kind of support Linux but with a lot of caveats and obnoxious quarks.