I can attest that having full control over a mini PC feels great compared to Android TV, if you have rather niche media consumption habits. Someone in my family had below their TV a laptop hooked up to an external drive full of local media, a DVD drive, and a crappy Android TV box only ever used to play YouTube videos. Replaced it all with an old SFF PC, put GNOME with 175% scaling on it, with a mini wireless keyboard to control it.

But as others have commented, a Linux setup falls apart as soon as you want to watch the mainstream streaming services.

Honestly no idea. I could perchance team up with trustworthy people to form some self-sufficient community, otherwise it’s just a matter of time before succumbing to the elements or other people. Would work on my fitness a bit more if I knew ahead of time the world would become like that.

I will admit, I miss the smooth graphics of Virtualbox. It’s quite evident with dragging windows around or playing a video inside a VM. Don’t want to touch Oracle stuff anymore though. Anyone here manage to get that working on virt-manager?

The way I’ve seen people around me use the dryer, for sure. High heat will ruin clothes more than anything else, especially if it continues to run after everything had dried out.

Back in university, we had timed dryers that could only do either high heat or tumble dry low for an hour. Rooms were too humid and cramped to air dry. Of course, I wasn’t going to spend more money waiting for low heat to do its work. Clothes came out bone dry and metal zippers scalding hot. Only the large towels held up, everything else noticeably faded and thinned over a couple years.

Night and day difference once I got my own place with a condenser dryer. It takes longer, but everything is just dry enough at the end of each cycle. It’s also a bit smaller so I have to air dry parts of larger loads, but either way, my clothes have held up much better ever since.

Functionally, not really. I can get my work done on anything from FVWM to GNOME without a hitch.

Aesthetically, very much. The Chicago95 theme sparks joy and makes work just a bit more enjoyable. KDE and GNOME might have more creature comforts, but I will happily tolerate XFCE because it works well with Chicago95. I don’t even do fresh installs anymore because of the time it takes for me to configure the visual style just right. I’ll instead image from an install I’ve prepared on a VM.

Counting all injuries to date, I think I would. Probably with a concussion and blood all over me though. My face would be in very rough shape from how much I’ve picked at it in the past.

Between 2 and 3. I’ll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won’t rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.

Because once you fall behind on anything, especially larger expenses, it’s pretty much over. You can’t recover from that unless you submit yourself to loan-hell.

Luigi time

Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.

Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

If OP indeed has the 6th gen iPod Touch, not the classic, it won’t be as rosy as most of the comment here suggest. From my experience replacing the battery on one, you need a hair dryer to loosen the glue and pry off the screen, then a soldering iron to replace the battery since its ribbon cable is directly soldered to the logic board. No storage expansion or custom firmware is available for such iOS devices, as far as I am aware.

Also watch out for low-quality replacement batteries, the first replacement I tried only lasted around an hour on a full charge.

Does that happen to be a variant? I replaced the battery in my aunt’s iPod Touch 6 a few years ago and did have to desolder the battery ribbon cable as it was directly soldered to the logic board. Took a lot of patience just getting to the battery too (screen is held on by glue unlike the clips/tabs in an iPhone).

Also interested to hear other people’s thoughts on reusing these old iOS devices, got one sitting around just collecting dust.

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

The desktop environment packages that tasksel uses (task-gnome-desktop, task-kde-desktop, etc) can be found towards the bottom of the list at: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/task-desktop. In theory, you can just uninstall the task-your-desktop package which takes away everything that DE came with. If that doesn’t work or doesn’t play well your earlier manual uninstallations, take note of the dependencies that the task packages pulled (including recommendations) and go about uninstalling the dependencies layer by layer.

Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet

It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.

Bog standard keyring. To keep everything parallel, the folding multitool gets a tiny sub-keyring and the metal USB stick gets a tiny carabiner (detaches to avoid load-bearing USB ports). Keychain goes in a velcro pouch that also holds a multi-tool pen, mini flashlight, and lighter. Pouch goes into front left pocket.

Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.

All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don’t really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.

If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.

Validates my feelings as a Debian user

The 1969 Apollo 11 mission. To capture the original signal from the lander and make backup copies of it

I am familiar with a child abuse victim who feels this way. Not like actively seeking it out, but they wouldn’t regret it much if it came to that point.

But I’m not personally qualified to comment on it. If it’s becoming more than a passing thought and starting to bother you in everyday life or causing actively homicidal thoughts, it’s a good time to seek professional help before it gets you into trouble.