I would say Arch if you are that tight on resources and comfortable doing so (the setup isn’t as bad as people make it sound, just look up a guide online), but Endeavour would get you to more or less the same place with much less complexity.

That said, is there any chance of upgrading the RAM? an extra 4GB or 8GB stick of DDR3/DDR3L off ebay would not cost too much, and would make a world of difference for things like modern web browsers.

My criteria for when to upgrade is simple: when it no longer runs the games I want to play at an acceptable framerate. I have a 30-series card, but I have yet to play a game where I had a problem with framerate, so I have no plans to upgrade. It wasn’t until I ran into a game where I was getting 20 FPS at minimum settings on my old GTX 960 that I decided it was time to upgrade.

One could probably say the same about workstation performance if it is taking too long to run and becoming a productivity bottleneck. For something like that, I think it comes down to an assessment of how much you will be spending versus what percentage reduction in processing time you will see out of the upgrade. If it is only a marginal improvement, maybe wait, but if it would be a substantial uplift, then it is probably a worthwhile return on investment.

Hmm, not sure then. It might be called something different. But I do know exactly the thing you mean from having it on my work computers, and I find it very annoying, too.

I believe some Dells have a bios setting for dynamic brightness which can be turned off.

Depending on what your definition of “decent” is, I think you may be disappointed. The cutoff for support is around 8th gen intel and AMD 3000-series from circa 2017-2018. Even my old 2017 laptop with a quad-core i5-8250U is supported.

Unless there are specific recent CPU models which are not supported, I think the majority of the unsupported laptops are going to be decade-old 6th and 7th gen or 1000/2000-series machines. These machines already go for fairly low prices on the used market.

It is a somewhat old-fashioned choice these days, but Arctic Silver 5 paste is still my go-to. It is very thick and not prone to pump-out or dry-out. I have systems that I have taken apart where the paste was still tacky a good 5-6 years later. I think some modern pastes are a degree or two cooler, but for a 15W U-series CPU I do not think that is as much of a concern.

Most tutorials online will be for desktop CPUs and will tell you to put a pea-sized bead in the center and press down, but this is more suitable for desktop CPUs with an integrated heat spreader and not laptop CPUs, which are typically direct die application and would probably either leave a ton of excess paste from a pea-sized dot, or risk an exposed corner for a smaller dot.

For direct die, I would suggest spreading an even layer of paste from edge to edge of the die using the edge of an old credit card or the like. You want to avoid stirring up the paste too much in order to avoid introducing air bubbles which could cause localized hot spots on the die.

I am a big fan of Zero Japan’s teapots. Glazed ceramic, and i have put them in the dishwasher for years with no issues. I think they also go by the name Bee House. The infuser they come with is pretty good, but it turns our that the mouth is also the perfect size for a Finum medium basket strainer.

1. There is no shame in dual booting. That will give you the freedom to find alternatives for everything in your workflow until you stop needing to boot into Windows at all. The preferred way is with a separate physical drive, because windows updates will sometimes overwrite the ESP partition or do other weird things which could break your Linux install.

2. Not an expert in that, sorry. There are plenty of articles online for alternatives for all of those.

3. Linux has no trouble reading NTFS. I have an NTFS network drive, and on my dual boot laptop I can simply reach into the NTFS partition on my second drive and grab files from it from Linux (Windows cannot read the Linux drive, though).

4. Not sure on those specific models, but I have a Behringer UM2 and Linux detects and works with it just fine.

Much appreciated for the heads up. I just ran into this, and this post saved me a modest amount of time.

Gesundheit

Sounds reasonable.

The Samsung 870 EVO should be comparable, if not even slightly better than the MX500 (1GB DRAM cache for the 870 vs 512MB for the MX500, and rated for 600TBW instead of 360TBW for the MX500). Samsung had a spate of failures with their 990 NVMe drives a while back, but aside from that they have a good reputation for reliability overall. I used one of the prior-generation 860 EVO drives in a laptop of mine for years and never had an issue.

Team Group is a decent budget brand in my book. Taiwanese-based memory seller who make both SSDs and RAM, even micro SD cards and flash drives. They have an actual product portfolio instead of just one or two models like the no-name drives. I have used their 4TB MP34 pcie gen 3 drives before with good success (now discontinued, but at one time they were one of the cheapest DRAM-cache NVMe drives available), and I have one of their MP44 gen 4 HMB drives in my current laptop.

The Samsung QVO drives are based on QLC NAND flash (Quad-Level Cell). It has lower write endurance than TLC (Triple-Level Cell) and they slow down to nearly hard drive speeds when close to full. Supposedly, the technology is lower cost, but when manufacturers charge effectively the same price or more for QLC as TLC drives, there is zero benefit for a consumer to buy them and they should probably be avoided.

I am not aware of any SATA SSDs which use HMB, so I am not sure if it would work correctly through an adapter. I think the choice for 2.5" SSDs is generally between DRAM cache SSDs and ones with SLC caching, which are typically much cheaper. I think both are pretty much able to saturate the ~500MB/s bandwidth of a SATA III connection, but may run into issues with prolonged writes or when getting very close to full.

Looking on Newegg, for DRAM cache units, things like the Samsung 870 evo and Crucial MX500 cost ~$90 or so for the 1TB model.

SLC cache units like the Crucial BX500 or Team Group CX2 are much less, more like $50-60 USD. The Team Group one claims 800TBW endurance for the 1TB model. I do not know if I believe that, but generally speaking I have used their nvme drives before and have not had any fail on me, for what that small data point is worth.

Detecting and setting up printers

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.

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.

How so? I have never found installing yay difficult, and using it is essentially the same as pacman with the addition of aur packages. What issues have you run into?

ClamAV

But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.