I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.
I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.
I’ve literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.
AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.
I don’t think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.
I can’t really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.
XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I’m sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.
I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.
ClamAV
But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.
My first distro was an Arch fork and I moved to vanilla Arch a year later. My problems in that time have been minimal. Personally, I am glad that someone recommended that I use an arch-based distro as a beginner. Mind you, I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn. I think for those types of people it can be appropriate to recommend Arch-based distros.
So, yes, if you are not willing to google a problem, read a wiki, or use the terminal once in a while, Arch or its forks are probably not for you. I would probably not recommend Arch as a distro for someone’s elderly grandparent or someone not comfortable with computers.
That said, I do not know that I agree with the assertion that Arch “breaks all the time,” or that I even understand what “Arch bullshit®” is referring to. This overblown stereotype that Arch is some kind of mythical distro only a step removed from Linux From Scratch has to stop. None of that has been my experience for the last 4 years. Actually, if anything, it is the forks that get dependency issues (looking at you, Manjaro) and vanilla Arch has been really solid for me.
I think it is not possible to avoid it in all cases, but the reputation and business practices of the controlling company are your best indicator. Any changes to a company’s culture may give signs if a piece of software may start to employ anti-consumer tactics.
Naturally, being closed source and in a dominant market position (i.e. a monopoly or near-monopoly) would make it easy for a company to start pulling these kinds of tactics. Sometimes even formerly reputable companies with open source software can try to do things like this after buyouts, changes in management, pressure from capital investors to increase profits, etc.
Generally, open source programs will be harder to monetize than closed source programs, as someone can fork the code and take out the disliked features. See Ungoogled chromium vs Google Chrome, VSCodium vs VSCode, Rocky Linux vs RHEL, etc.
Manjaro was my first distro. I used a number of AUR packages and ran into excessive dependency issues due to Manjaro’s packages being held back and often a version or two behind. This eventually led me to switch to vanilla arch. Unless one plans on not using any AUR packages at all, I do not recommend it.
Manjaro also uses the pamac gui package manager, which has a bit of a history of “DDOS”-ing the AUR with excessive requests. Apparently, the search field in pamac would begin querying the AUR after every letter typed to try and populate autocomplete results, hammering it with requests. Pamac also does not distinguish between package repos, so even just having AUR enabled and searching for a regular repo package would send requests to the AUR. Apparently it got so bad that it took down the AUR and they started returning 403 to requests from pamac users. In fact, this happened a second time and got them blocked again. This got the Manjaro devs in bad graces with a number of Linux folks as it was not a bug, but a poor design choice.
If it has an ethernet port (or perhaps a USB to ethernet dongle), maybe a PiHole DNS using Debian or the like? It is apparently supported on other Linux distros than Raspbian.
If it supports micro SD XC (i.e. capacities higher than 32GB) or you have a USB hard drive or high capacity USB flash drive, maybe a samba server for file storage? I often use my file server as a substitute for digging out a flash drive any time I want to quickly pass a file between two machines in my house.
Do you have the bolt and plasma-thunderbolt packages installed? I believe I had to do that to use a thunderbolt SSD enclosure/docks with my laptop. I am not sure about DP alt mode, though.
Arch w/ KDE gamer here. I have generally had a good experience with it. I think everything you said is generally accurate. In terms of customization, lack of bloat, and a good wiki, Arch is generally considered to be all of those things. A rolling distro like Arch I believe will also be getting the latest proton updates, which may help with sooner game compatibility/optimization updates on more recent releases.
I say go for it.
Yes, but my larger point is that you are doing the same thing, but in the negative. You are taking your specific problems and then putting forward the conclusion that they are the reasons why “regular” Linux users should not use Linux, as though these were universal problems. I am saying that I do not have those issues and that they are far from universal.
Yes, the modular nature of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. There is legitimate debate to be had on that. But that is not how your post frames the issue.
As stated above, not all of these things are even Linux problems. I would say that if iOS refuses to play nice with Linux but every other ecosystem works fine, the blame lies with Apple, not with Linux. It is not Linux’s job to fix the interoperability problems of other ecosystems. The GNOME problems are related to a specific subset of Linux users, and even before today I would have said that I would not recommend GNOME to new users because of how nonstandard it can be.
I am looking through these issues and I cannot say that I can relate on almost any of these. Sorry to hear you have been having so many issues!
I do plenty of gaming and cannot think of a time where I have had GPU driver issues (despite the fact that I have Nvidia graphics on 3 out of 4 of my systems, which is supposedly more problematic).
My bluetooth works fine, and it has been literally years since an update broke something, bluetooth or otherwise (which I cannot say the same for Windows on my work computer).
I use KDE connect, SFTP, and SMB servers and I have never had any issues transferring files between Windows, Android, and Linux. What do you mean about that? (seeing other replies, it sounds like you are using iOS. That sounds like that may be an Apple problem and not a Linux problem, because Apple tend to be terrible about playing nice with other ecosystems)
The scaling is the one point I can sort of relate on. I think there is still some work to be done regarding DPI and scaling on Linux, but it’s not enough of an issue to make me want to switch operating systems.
As for GNOME issues and window decorations, that sounds like a GNOME problem. GNOME does things very differently to all of the other DEs and forces programs to manually define their own window decorations rather than allowing standard default icons like other DEs, so my understanding is that GNOME in particular tends to be a source of constant headaches for Linux developers.
And I’m not some sysadmin or CS major. If I have a problem, I do a web search. If I can’t find it there, I make a forum thread. I don’t post a rant saying that Linux is a bad OS, lol.
I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would “never, ever break down.”
I am not sure, then. If you are on a laptop, you might try one or the other of those utilities regardless simply because they can improve battery life, but that is a separate issue.
Interesting. Do you use Powertop or TLP, by any chance? Some power utilities will turn on USB power saving if there is no activity on a USB port for a while, which can cause issues with USB mice. Generally I turn off that specific setting, or I believe there might be some way to whitelist certain USB devices to not have this sleep behavior.
Are there mice which are not supported in Linux? Everything I have used from a junky unbranded wireless mouse to a high end Logitech gaming mouse have all been plug and play for me. Even the RGB settings can be configured in openRGB.
Comfort should always be an important factor in a mouse for any OS, I would think. In terms of build quality, I have had the rubber on some mice start to degrade over time, but that is about it. Even the cheapest mice that are hard plastic can last for decades with no problem.
I would say that switchable DPI would be a must-have feature for me with modern displays. As someone with a 4k monitor, some junky office mice do not have enough sensitivity for me on high resolution monitors even with the setting cranked to max in the settings menu.
For wireless mice, I prefer AA battery mice over USB rechargeable mice, but that is a matter of personal preference. If my mouse battery dies in a AA mouse, I can swap the rechargeable NiMH battery in a minute and continue using it. However, if a USB rechargeable mouse is dead, I either have to use it on a tether for a while or remember to constantly keep recharging it. Also, having an integrated li-ion battery will give any mouse a limited lifespan unless you are willing to open up and solder in a new battery when it wears out, whereas I have some AA-powered mice which are going strong probably a decade later, so long I have had to open them up and re-solder them with new microswitches instead of new batteries.
I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?
No problem! Mint XFCE sounds perfect to me.
That covers a pretty wide range of hardware, but that era would be around 2009-2015, give or take, so you would be looking at around Intel 1st gen to 6th gen most likely (Let’s be honest, there is nearly zero chance institutions would be using anything but Intel in that era). Pentium-branded CPUs from that time range, unfortunately, likely means low-end dual core CPUs with no hyperthreading, so 2C/2T, but I have run Linux on Core2-era machines without issue, so hopefully the CPU specs will be okay.
2-8GB of DDR3 RAM is most likely for that era, and as others point out, will be your biggest issue for running browsers. If the RAM is anything like the CPUs, I am assuming you will be looking at the lower end with 2-4GB depending on how old the oldest machines you have are, so I second the recommendation of maybe consolidating the RAM into fewer machines, or if you can get any kind of budget at all, DDR3 sticks on ebay are going to be dirt cheap. A quick look and I see bulk listings of 20x4GB sticks for $26.
In terms of DE, I second anything with XFCE, but if you could bump them up to around 8GB RAM, then I think any DE would be feasible.
Hard drives shouldn’t be an issue I think, since desktop hard drives in the 320GB-1TB range would have been standard by then. Also, you are most likely outside of the “capacitor plague” era, so I would not expect motherboard issues, but you might open them up and dust them out so the fans aren’t struggling. Re-pasting the CPUs would also probably not be a bad idea, so maybe consider adding a couple $5 tubes of thermal paste to a possible budget. Polysynthetic thermal compounds which do not dry out easily would be preferable, and something like Arctic Silver 5 would also be an era-appropriate choice, lol.
Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.
Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.
I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.