i think gnome, suitably configured, is a great choice for a basic pc or chromebook|box alternative. simple windows, fewer options to get lost in or to screw up, big fat launcher buttons for the one or very few things that’ll ever get run. throw in atomic updates and flatpak only applications, and it’s near perfect for these users.

and if you have a potato pc, read s-l-o-w-e-r

i still make a swap partition (inside the encrypted volume group). if it’s used, great–if not, no big deal, as ssd should keep some empty bits anyway.

my first install of debian was before it had names. my most recent was last tuesday. i’ve strayed for short stints, but debian is where it’s at. i do have a couple ‘others’ but they are special setups for specific things.

if you like the deb-based system but want to get away from canonical, trixie is ready to rescue you.

that’s where we take a lot of our junk, too… but we also buy from there when we can, instead of amazon.

someone with a corner office in redmond reminded someone else that shareholders expect to see an immediate return on their $100+ billion ‘investment’ in this shit.

hope you have your motherboard sourced already. lga1200 mini-itx gonna be a tough one to find reasonably priced, otherwise.

cachy is the current ‘flavour of the day’, apparently.

manjaro is arch-based, with different repositories than ubuntu or debian-based distributions. what it offers via the DE’s software ‘manager’ will likely be a bit different.

i use aptitude whenever i want to take a closer look at recommends and suggested packages in a .deb-based system. it’s been my preferred package manager since it was originally released back around woody (deb 3.0)

for games or a mix of games and applications, i would also consider using proton or similar instead of messing around with wine directly on its own.

i use bottles myself, because i just have a few smaller windows applications to set up and it works well-enough for those.

‘clean’ installers are linked from this forum sticky: https://board.jdownloader.org/showthread.php?t=54725

note that the program updates itself at install (and frequently thereafter) so you don’t need an ‘updated’ installer every time you want to install it on something.

leftovers. breakfast taco, fish sandwich, reheated french fries from friday’s lunch, maybe part of a burrito.

letterboxing built into the video so DVD players show them correctly. Since that loses some pixels up front, they require using higher quality levels to prevent visual lossiness.

Letterbox and pillars baked-in actually has very little, if any, impact on filesize or quality, when encoding from the same source and settings (other than the one dimension that was trimmed)

Flash is slow to write to. Even ‘USB3’ ones can get bogged down on long writes or copying lots of little files.

It is often the graphics hardware blocking it in this case… disabling hardware decoding in the browser may ‘help’, if your CPU can handle it (you can still use hardware encoding, tho)

I only buy one of these when they’re on clearance (‘day old’ in the cold case) for two dollars…

even with all ‘legit’ sources for everything wordpress-related, maintaining it is a PITA–which is why i send anyone who asks me about wp to their own hosting service. i don’t wanna deal with that shit.

you don’t need “everything”… and if you did, you’d perhaps also need to recreate the entire working windows environment. so make full hdd backup image to satisfy that requirement—or, don’t reformat and reuse the drive, just pull it as-is for safekeeping–executing a full shutdown first: shutdown /s /t 0

as far as the user files go… this is the basics of what i do (migrations for home users is about half of my workload):

copy user libraries (the default locations windows saves your files to) for each user account:

robocopy c:\users(windowsuserprofiledir) d:(destinationonexternal) /e /dcopy:t /copy:dt /xjd /xa:sh /xd appdata /r:1 /w:1 /mt:2

put each user’s files into their own destination directory.

use care when backing up directories linked to or taken-over by cloud services (looking at you, onedrive). make sure the files copied actually exist on the destination drive.

export bookmarks and saved passwords from every browser and browser profile from each windows user account.

backup steam or its directories for later restoration, if wanted.

save mailstores from local mail clients. not many home users run a mail client with local stores anymore. the windows-only free-to-use (but not foss) ‘mailstore home’ in portable mode run off an external might be useful (yes, it can run in a vm later if needed). don’t forget to jot down mail server configs.

check ‘public’ and other places for stray files.

optionally, backup browser profile directories, zip 'em up (fastest compression is enough). if you restore entire profiles, you might preserve more of the browser environment… but chromium ones will still choke on logins, so having password exports is critically important. most people are fine with just having bookmarks and passwords migrated–which are easily backed up, and normally what i restore instead of entire profiles (unless it’s firefox to firefox, and windows to windows).

make sure you know the credentials for and can login to important sites and services from a different pc or a private window without leaning on saved sessions in existing browsers on the current windows pc.

if there’s something else specifically that you want to save, like a wallpaper that you don’t have the original source file for… a quick web search will likely reveal its location.

my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a ‘browser launcher’ with an appstore ‘out-of-the-box’).

(and then there’s the data, which uses even more)

pizza is usually a finger food, unless it’s something like a chicago deep dish.