Gentoo installation is time-consuming, but Gentoo maintenance usually isn’t. Just allocate portage a couple of cores while you do something else with the rest of the computer. Or leave the update to run overnight, if you’re on a potato.

So of the three happiest distros, two aren’t very concerned with mainstream appeal and will carry on contentedly doing their thing while ignoring rankings like this. Sounds about right.

Exactly what I was thinking. “People who are already less happy tend to gravitate towards Firefox” is as valid a takeaway from those graphs as anything else. (Also, where are all the other browsers? I’d expect Edge and Safari, at least, to be represented, even if Vivaldi and various Firefox forks were not.)

There are some older DE-agnostic virtual keyboards (svkbd, xvkbd, matchbox), but they may not work in Wayland, if that’s what you’re using.

Distro best added to the “Power-user distros to avoid” list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).

I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn’t the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn’t appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that’s been broken by automation that didn’t quite work as expected. Anyway, I’d suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.

Too lazy to check github . . . will it work on systems that don’t run Gnome? It would be nice not to have to figure out how to hand-write a GTK4 theme as I did with GTK3.

I think that’s the old locolor icon theme. The version I have around is modified for TDE, but the original should exist somewhere out there (if OpenSUSE is still offering KDE3, then they probably have it).

TDE’s CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There’s also a matching widget style (Motif). I’d guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that’s currently limited to X11.

LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.

Generic distro kernel? You shouldn’t have any problems.

Hand-compiled kernel cooked up with -march=native? You’re sticking with AMD, so there should still be no issues unless some instruction got dropped between the old CPU and the new, which almost never happens. You might have to add a kernel module or two for things built into your mobo, nothing serious.

(Hell, I had a Windows 2000 install on a multi-boot system survive an upgrade like that, once upon a time. Just booted perfectly happily on the new hardware.)

As far as I’m concerned, everything goes under /mnt , and has for the past 18+ years.

“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.

Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.

Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).

Red Hat’s interests often don’t seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It’s the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they’re a for-profit corporation).

It’s the sort of thing that many people won’t really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.

Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt to rpm, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.

(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)

Even better: “#1 in the count y” with a damaged area right before the y. Missing letter or just bad kerning? No one will be able to tell until after they taste the pizza! 😜

That would gum up the belt on the sander, which surely is not responsible for the thumbnails.

If it were an Itanium, the OP would know it. They’re not common (and I doubt Puppy would have booted on such a system—it isn’t compatible with x86).

Also, support for that arch is being dropped from the Linux kernel as of 6.7.0, so looking for a supporting distro would be a fool’s quest (Gentoo still technically offers Itanium packages, but they’re on the way out.)

I agree that Gentoo will probably work, as it still has functional i486 support. Be aware that you may be spending a lot of time compiling if you go that route and don’t have a second, faster machine to use for distcc or the like.

As for the nvidia card, the proprietary driver won’t work for something of that age. Check the supported cards in Nouveau (and maybe even the really old drivers for prehistoric cards). In a pinch, the vesa driver should work. Good luck.