Wayland and Cosmic are not there yet for beginners, more like beta, watch videos from Brodie Robertson, I’ll wait half year at least to try that for newbies.

But web browsers and video players are going to be painful with any distro.

This!

Even 4GB RAM is low for web browsers and they’re gonna struggle, A LOT, even with just one tab open, is going to be painfully slow to not want to use it anymore.

Old laptops like this, don’t have hardware video decoders for YouTube or any video in AVC or HEVC códecs that is used everywhere today.

You can use Gnumeric for spreadsheets and Abiword for docs if Libreoffice is too slow.

• SliTaz is fun to play and very small.
• Puppy Linux is very capable and there are Debian variants.

Bad idea, they struggle with YouTube or any video because they don’t have hardware decoders for AVC/HEVC.

Maybe can decode by software, something easy on CPU (MPEG1 maybe), and the conversion is done by other machine.

Maybe audio?

Reference: I have one of those Atom netbooks.

EFI didn’t work for me, maybe I need LILO

Not so obscure, just 50mb and very functional, in between tiny core and puppy.

Not really obscure

1. LTSC + WSL (Better than VM)
2. Dual Boot
3. Linux only

To me Adobe has very bad UI, I did try to use it, and first time was awful. Freehand was a lot more intuitive, but when Macromedia was bought, was killed.

I get it, that a lot of people did learn to use Adobe UI, and of course they want the same because they’re used to, but doesn’t make it better.

Affinity is more friendlier than PS to me.

I’m not saying that GIMP UI is perfect or good, but right now, to my casual use case, is not bad. Obviously can be better, and get some ideas from other UIs.

I prefer:

• ImagePipe: fast edit
• Snapseed: complex edit (not FOSS)
• Aves: gallery
• Superimage: AI upscaler (RealESRGAN)
• Waifu2x NCNN: AI upscaler (Waifu2x, RealCuGAN)

With ChaiNNer you can remove background, upscale (local), it’s a lot more flexible and compatible with models than Upscayl, also a little bit more complex (node based, not as complex as comfyUI). You can upscale an image with a face model and use other model for everything else in the same image.

Use Termux, you need:

• Android Tablet/Smartphone.
• Bluetooth keyboard.
• Cheap stand 4 device.

That’s my setup to play tabletop rpg (DND5E) for a couple of years, all CLI using any text editor you like with markdown. I use: tmux, vis.

In your case: SC-IM, visidata, any text editor.

With Termux you can use packages from repo or from other distros with proot-distro, like: Alpine, Avoid, Debian, Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu.

• ChaiNNer: is very flexible and can do all of that. Node based.
• Upscayl: do only upscales with less models, but has simpler UI, very fast in AMD GPU (because NCNN).

• I haven’t tried automatic1111 or ComfyUI yet.
• All of them work offline withou limits and are more flexible than online alternatives.

GIMP has:

• OpenVINO.
• stable-gimpfusion
• gimp-stable-boy

Do you know the exploit was detected in Debian Sid? (by a PostgreSQL developer), Arch got the update (with both compromised versions), but because don’t directly link openssh to liblzma (as Debian), and thus this attack vector is not possible.

Also, other rolling distros also got the compromised versions, maybe: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Endeavour OS, Fedora Rawhide, Slackware -current, etc.

Today got that, I can’t copy magnet. No need to disable UBO, just did “block element”, that created in my filters:

1337x.to###freevpnBG

And now works as expected.

• Cmus.
• mpg123 4 internet radios.
• FFplay | mpv.
• zxtune.
• Years ago: moc or deadbeef (because foobar2000).

Maybe netsurf, Dillo or w3m/links, if you don’t need JavaScript, if you do, you need at least 4GB RAM to have a better web experience.

Today’s web is very RAM hungry (bloat).

• Hardware (GPU) encoders are worst than software encoders.
• GPU Acceleration is good for faster encoding and free CPU to do other things. But you get bigger files at similar quality.
• Maybe is useful for live streaming or if you really really need CPU do other things.

• This or any tiling window manager, because small screen. If dwm is hard for you, try with bellow options.
• i3wm was my first, but now I’m happy with my actual dwm config.
• Awesomewm starts as a dwm fork, but with all included and easier for beginners.
• There are a lot more, but I start with this.

You get better screen use space and smaller memory requirements.

But your real big problem, is going to be web browser, all of them consume insane amount of RAM because of web bloat, and always is going to be a problem. Just 1 tab open and a lot of patience.

My old netbook had just 1GB ram, later I did an upgrade to 2GB and was the maximum possible.