I’ve never heard of librewolf preventing dark mode. Garuda’s firedragon browser was based on librewolf before switching to floorp, and it came with the darkreader extension by default.

Garuda. It’s even easier than Manjaro. The theming can be a bit much, though.

Aside from your preference for debian-based distros, you’re describing Garuda pretty well. But the chaotic-AUR is enabled by default, so you’d never need to hunt for .deb files in the first place. And the update script, “garuda-update”, has a bunch of nice features by default, like taking snapshots and running grub-update (which would have prevented the grub fiasco that hit the arch-based distros a while back).

The only pain points are 1.) If you don’t like Garuda’s theming, you’ll need to do some minor ricing to start, and 2.) Plasma 6 updates often enough that on a rolling release distro, something minor about your setup might break once every few months, e.g. KDE allows themes to set a minimum taskbar size and all of a sudden your taskbar increases in size, or your wallpaper gets reset for some reason.

KDE, because I’m too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that’s more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

Pretty much any distro can do everything you want. But since you liked crunchbang, consider Mabox. It’s an openbox distro based on Manjaro with a bunch of QoL improvements like super+arrow to tile a window, or their own little fork of jgmenu to expand the functionality of the tint2 panel, plus some custom ricing tools. I’m not saying it’s the best distro ever, but it might give you just the right nostalgic feels.

One good thing doesn’t even outweigh one bad one. What do you call someone who tells 99 truths and one lie?

A liar.

It’s the same here; there’s an asymmetry between doing what’s right and betraying someone’s trust. When Mozilla can demonstrate consistent integrity, maybe I’ll stop using a fork.

I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

Disclaimer: I’m incredibly ignorant. Wouldn’t wireless necessarily mean high-latency?

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Mabox!

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Thank you for providing an actual answer. Most of the comments in this thread are condescending as hell.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won’t find many lowercase “l” libertarians here though.

How important is the Windows-style desktop? If the VM is designed for one thing and one thing only, I’d pick any minimal WM that can alt-tab, say JWM, and then just add Firefox and Thunderbird to the autostart file.

Having seen a total eclipse before, I know solar eclipses are in danger of being overhyped. IMO, they probably aren’t worth driving across the country. But if all you need is a 3 to 5 hour drive to get to the path of totality, I think you should absolutely do it. They’re legit. Not, like, life changing, but legit. Find a place with a few trees so you can watch the crescent shadows and maybe hear some wildlife freak out.

I’m shocked Lemmy has so many users. Feels like only a few thousand.

Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don’t want to waste space on flatpaks.

Sometimes you can literally just go to the youtube invidious channel of a professor at a big name college, if it’s the kind of topic where a lecture series alone can provide the education you’re looking for.

I’ve never dived into this, but if electronic keyboards are just glorified midi-controllers, I’d have to think you could find a FOSS solution. If they’re not simply midi-controllers, I wouldn’t begin to know. I’d imagine you might have an easier time with keyboards from the 90s or whenever.

You can skip this comment if you’re avoiding anything arch-based; I don’t have any additional distro suggestions beyond what’s already listed (they really are mostly the same), but in regard to the arch-based suggestions, I would only add that you can reduce the maintenance by choosing a DE with a slower update cycle (e.g. XFCE or any WM) and, more importantly, remembering that you don’t actually have to update your system every day. Even once a month is probably fine. I don’t get the impression you want vanilla Arch though; Endeavor or even Manjaro minimal will have the defaults you’re looking for, or literally any other non-Arch distro if the AUR isn’t important to you.