I used to play around with an original Eee PC 700 quite a bit.
The most interesting experiment was installing Debian without X and using that as a desktop OS.
I used links2 in framebuffer mode to browse the internet, alpine for mail, cmus for music, fbi to view images, mplayer to watch movies, mc for file management and tmux for multi-tasking. It worked surprisingly well and solved the issue of the tiny storage, anemic processor, low RAM and small screen, but only after you’ve memorized all the keyboard commands.
Ubuntu changes the entire underlying technology too often cause they always try to introduce their own system in place of something that’s already established (Upstart, Unity, Snap, etc.)
My last experiences with Ubuntu were one upgrade that failed to boot after following all the recommended steps, one upgrade where the release notes themselves recommended a fresh install to enable all functionality and a fresh install where the first thing I saw after booting was an error message by Gnome about a crashed service.
I left the distro after that and haven’t looked back. Admittedly, that was quite some time ago. It’s likely they’ve improved since then (but so have all other distros).
It depends. Old Windows games actually work better in Wine than on modern Windows.
Newer games usually work out of the box via Steam and Proton, often with better performance than on Windows. Especially on a pc with ATI graphics.
AAA titles with anticheat often don’t work, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what OP is after.
How old is your PC? Do you game via Steam?
If it is younger than 10 years, any desktop oriented distro will work equally well.
In that case, I’d recommend Mint, just because it is the best beginner distro overall.
If you have less than 4GB of RAM, Debian with Xfce would run faster.
If it’s older, then there’s a (small, but getting larger with age) chance it is limited to 32bit architecture or 32bit UEFI.
Then your choice of distros becomes slim, but MX Linux would be a good choice.
I do. Gnome is a special case because it doesn’t give you a lot of options. It’s take it or leave it, and it doesn’t follow the traditional mouse-centric desktop workflow.
But in my opinion it’s absolutely perfect for a laptop where you use the keyboard and touchpad. With a few key combos and swipe gestures you can fly through the UI and it only ever shows you what’s relevant at the moment.
No. Currently Firefox is the only browser that can run Spotify and Netflix on my machine. Neither Chromium nor Epiphany do that.
Firefox needs to stay functional for “normal” people who consume DRM media, use Google and visit Websites that break if you block their trackers.
Otherwise its market share drops to zero and webdevs will stop testing for its engine, giving Google full control over the web.
There are more than enough options out there for people who want full privacy.
There is no problem with using a point release system long term. The problem is using Ubuntu. I’ve never once successfully upgraded it from one release to the next without issues, errors, things breaking or loss of functionality. It’s the main reason why I’ll never use Ubuntu again.
So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I’ll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system.
With Mint, you should be able to get to a working system that lets you do your paperwork within less than half an hour.
You can set up all your customizations again when you have more time. But it should also be no issue to just copy your old /home folder to the new system between Mint and Ubuntu. Then the only step after installation would be to install the programs you had before.
If I have an issue with Linux, I look for a tutorial on Youtube. Most of the time the best result is a video of an Indian kid half my age who explains exactly what I need in a concise easy to understand manner, while typing every word they say into notepad.
How was this measured? Just asking cause a lot of PCs are sold with Linux there cause it’s cheaper and the user immediately slaps a pirated Windows on after purchase.