It’s still a supported architecture in Gentoo. I expect it will limp along there for as long as there is viable kernel source (current or LTS) and at least one interested maintainer. So if you have an Itanium machine lying around, you can install a current Linux on it. As long as you’re willing to follow a long set of instructions, anyway.
Nearly all hardware support is kept in the kernel until and unless it bitrots to the point of unusability. I’ve had no issues with a 5.10-series kernel on my 2008 laptop, and I don’t expect any issues when I finally get around to upgrading it to 6.x (well, except the usual tedium of compiling a kernel on a machine that weak).
They didn’t include my distro of choice (Gentoo) or my desktop environment (TDE) . . . but I’m not surprised. Lists like this aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and they always reflect the author’s biases and what they’ve been exposed to. Not including someone else’s favourites doesn’t make them bad lists for the purpose they’re intended to serve.
Probably the best way to deal with newbie choice paralysis is a big flowchart, or a questionaire: "Which of these are important to you: ‘just works’ - stability - customizability - organizational transparency - keeping up with the bleeding edge - . . . "
You’re using software that’s being continuously developed by people for whom stability of the UI is not a priority. Pointless UI churn is normal. Half-assed solutions kept beyond their best-before date are normal. Windows does this crap too. At least with Linux you have a choice of which issues you’re going to tolerate (or you can pick a DE where UI stability is a priority for the development team).
Linux mostly follows POSIX standards, even though it’s never been certified as compliant, so much code targeting POSIX systems runs on Linux too. In other words, it didn’t establish any standards so much as adopt one that already existed.
There is no POSIX standard for package managers, however.
Ooh, CRT monitor. And that’s an odd resolution that it’s suggesting. You could try driving it at 1280x1024 at 60Hz. If that doesn’t work, try 800x600 at 60Hz, which is the traditional lowest SVGA resolution (picture may be slightly distorted if it really is a 5:4 monitor). If that doesn’t work, try the traditional VGA resolution of 640x480 just to get something going. I’d recommend using X as Wayland has probably not been tested very much on hardware this old. And it almost certainly has no clue how to deal with a widescreen resolution or a resolution wider than its “Recommend mode”.
(I was still using a 17" CRT with X at 1280x960 up to about five years ago. I had no issues ever.)
Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package manager. Most of the rest is just selected default values for configuration and cosmetics, and what helper scripts are or aren’t present on the system. They’re both mainstream distributions aimed at the general user, and they’re shaped by their goals.
To see how different distributions can be, you need to compare the mainstream distributions to stuff that’s decidedly not mainstream, like Gentoo, Alpine, and Nix.
Just as a trivia note: Gentoo does package a couple of other distros’ package managers (app-arch/rpm and app-arch/dpkg), for use in installing otherwise-unavailable commercial binaries, although I suspect app-arch/rpm2targz sees more use than either of them.
Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.
TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.
Provided that the approriate drivers and binary firmware blobs for the new card are already on your system (and with a user-friendly distro like Mint, they should be), I’d expect you to be able just to plug in and go. The only extra hoops I had to jump through while sidegrading from a 1050 to an AMD card of the same era were due to my having a hand-configured kernel and X setup with no AMD drivers.
The difference isn’t all that noticeable, to be honest, or at least I’ve never found it so. If you’re using older hardware, you’re going to get an older “experience” anyway. The most user-visible kernel improvements tend to be improvements in hardware support, which is irrelevant if your hardware is already fully supported. However, I don’t do anything fancy with my machines—no full-disc encryption or the like. I usually don’t even need an initram to boot the system. So maybe you would notice something if your machines were more complicated.
(Note that the laptop I mentioned above started out with, um, a 3.x kernel? It gets a new one every year or so. The only kernel changes affecting it that were significant enough to draw my attention since 2008 were a fix in the support for the Broadcom wireless card it carries, and some changes to how hibernation works, which didn’t matter in the end because I basically never did try all that hard to get hibernation working on that machine.)
Some native distro formats are unlikely to ever be supported by services of this type. For instance, neither of the two services you list in your opening post will generate Gentoo ebuilds, most likely because the process is fundamentally different: an ebuild is a set of instructions for the package manager, not a prepacked binary.
The last one is from 2017, alas. The current Gentoo GUI ISO only includes KDE and fluxbox ( full package list, just in case someone’s really bored and wants a look).
You’re unlikely to have issues unless an entire architecture loses support from your distro, and if you’re running x86_64, that isn’t going to happen for a long, long time. I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t compile a new workable kernel for an existing system out of Gentoo’s repositories. The only time I’ve ever needed to put an upgrade aside for a few months involved a machine’s video card losing driver support from nvidia—I needed a few spare hours to make sure there were no issues while over to nouveau before I could install a new kernel.
Note that you can run an up-to-date userland on an older kernel, too, provided you make sensible software choices. Changes to the kernel are not supposed to break userspace—that’s meant to keep older software running on newer kernels, but it also works the other way around quite a bit of the time.