Oh yeh. I heard that, just forgot. Thanks for reminding me.

At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.

Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.

Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it’s all being sent over RDP.

I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.

When it freeze, after you’ve rebooted it, try running sudo journalctl -p 5 -b -1; you might see something in those logs.

Maybe also open a task manager before you do anything graphics intensive, just to see if there’s a process that rapidly increases its memory usage; while it might not be the cause, I’ve experienced similar freezes when I use all my memory (on a machine with 32GB of RAM).

FYI Don’t use this command. I think it was intended as a joke, but I just want to clarify.

Fun fact: you didn’t have to reinstall; you can actually boot up a live usb and chroot into your install to fix things.

That is kind of awesome.

I wish Debian’s default Grub theme was less ugly; I know I could change it (and I have on other installs, but I’m quite lazy about theming these days. Part of it is I have a laptop that I rely on for college and don’t want to risk any theme glitches, so I keep its Debian install as vanilla as possible.

May I ask what your config was, such as distro, packaging format, and extensions were used? Also, what hardware?

Additionally, what issues specifically were you experiencing specifically? Were sites just loading slowly?

I ask because I’ve used recent versions Firefox on decently old hardware with 4 GB of RAM and 2 cores and had almost no problems. Everything rendered correctly and in a reasonable amount of time. I’d be curious to know why that isn’t happening for you.

May I ask: when did you last try Firefox? There was a period during the 2010s when it has truly horrible performance, but they rolled out some major updates several years ago that greatly improved performance (though wouldn’t call some of the UI changes improvements).

Honestly, every major rendering engine is terrible in some way.

• Blink is resource intensive and has so many non-standard APIs for the sake of Google’s version of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
• WebKit takes 50 years to support the newest standards.
• Gecko (Firefox) is non-modular and is limited to being used in Firefox, Thunderbird, and forks and Firefox as a result. Its performance is also somewhat worse than Chrome’s, but not noticeable for daily use.

Ultimately, I choose Firefox because its issues are the least annoying to me. I do wish its structure was more community-based and less corporation-eating-its-own-hand, but whatever. So long as Debian sees it fit to keep in its repos, I’ll use it.

Honestly, even those don’t run that horrid for me when I have to use them.

It’s pre-T2, so it should be very easy to install a Linux distro on it. The only bit of misery you’re going to encounter, as others have said, is the Broadcom drivers. Except for a select few distros, you’ll probably need a USB Ethernet adapter for installing the operating system and adding the drivers.

Also, I’d rather put my hand in the circle saw than try running a rolling release on this laptop because the driver uses DKMS, meaning that kernel updates sometimes break it.

I only know this because the desktop I’m typing this on has a Broadcom Wi-Fi card from when I used to bare metal Hackintosh this machine. I’ve since moved to a nice house with an Ethernet port in every room; also, I just use macOS in a VM these days anyways.

As others have said, OCLP is a thing and a well-oiled machine from what I hear, but also, the oath I have made to the Church of Linuxology demands that I at least recommend Linux.

As said by @[email protected], bog standard Debian Stable.

You really don’t want a rolling release distro for something like this - major software updates might change the behavior of your software, break your configs, etcetera. Stable distros do as much as they can to make sure that software behaves the same, only porting security fixes.

This way, you don’t really have to touch it except for updates with a nearly nonexistent chance of going wrong (and there’s stuff like unattended-upgrades so updates are automatic) and major upgrades.

You can go several years without a major upgrade just fine - Debian versions are supported for 5 years, and we’re only a few days from getting Trixie, which will last into 2030. New versions come out every two years, and it’s not that hard to upgrade between consecutive ones; I don’t think sitting down on a weekend every two years is that bad.

I kind of hate Ubuntu, but it’s pretty based in this case due to really long support. This might be a really great case for Rocky Linux though, as it also gets 10 years support.

On a more serious note, as others have said, you’ll probably burn through these weird storage limitations quickly.

Also, what do you mean by “sensitive matters” on Mint? Because almost any way you spin it, I feel like it’s not a great idea:

• If you’re talking professional, confidential work with clients, keeping it on the same device where you do anything personal sounds like a terrible idea, and it’s probably worth it to shell out for a dedicated device just for this.
• If it’s more personal things like government documents, medical records, and other things I’ll neglect to name here, running a separate operating system just for those just feels like unnecessary paranoia and will cause you unnecessary trouble. If you’re careful, it shouldn’t be a problem - the major browsers prevent file access through protections against cross-site scripting.

Also, as I said in another comment here, please upgrade that drive before you put a lot of data on it. If you don’t and you run out of storage later (a near-certainty on 256GB), you’ll have to go through the effort of getting everything copied, which may include equipment purchases and several hours of your time when you could jut do it right now while your important files are still small enough to fit on a flash drive right now. Save yourself the future trouble.

Anyhow, I wish you happy Linux usage.

The no restart is kind of awesome. WebGPU progress is also great, even if not on Linux yet.

You can self-sign and self-enroll secure boot keys. Can’t say it’s an easy process, though - I had a lot of misery with it on my Surface Go 1st Gen. Might be better on my Thinkpad.

I tried UE5 on Debian Testing and it seemed to work fine.

If it works there, it’ll probably work on almost anything.

Personally, I dislike Ubuntu, but if it’s been working for you, you shouldn’t have problems.

I really like Debian and think it’s not too difficult, but it isn’t for everyone and might not be your thing.

I mostly prefer Detail view, but I enable Icon view in Videos, Photos, and Music folders so I can see previews.

I’m guessing most file managers have similar behavior, but on XFCE Thunar, I’m able to set detail as the default but have it remembery choice per folder.

While (I think) you can install HWE (hardware enablement) kernels on Mint, you would also have to upgrade Mesa, which is not as easy on Mint.

Personally in this case, for a truly stable distro, I’d install Debian Stable and install a backports kernel and backports Mesa, which are both currently versions that should support RDNA4 GPUs like OPs just fine. This involves two simple steps after installing:

1. Enable the Debian Backports Repo (see https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/). It’s like, one file.
2. Install the packages with something like sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64 mesa-va-drivers and reboot.

Before you take these steps, you probably won’t have hardware acceleration, but will still get video output so you can perform the steps and reboot.

This is definitely a weird suggestion, and other people’s suggestions might be less work out of the box. I just like Debian, and stability+backports+testing is part of what makes it possible for it to be my everything distro.

Oh yeh. The font menu is crap. I can’t argue with that.

It’s one of those mysterious annoying things that’s up there with the GTK file picker in some apps taking 10 seconds to load.

But I also don’t change fonts that often. Still, that has much room for improvement.

Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.

The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.

The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.

Now the KDE thing actually sounds like it sucks.