as a kludge to hold you over until you make a decision – you can isolate what you need to keep dry in a dry-bag or trash-compactor-bag (budget option) stuffed inside your existing backpack

• for most people, use whatever your distro ships with and installs for you
• choosing desktop environments still starts heated discussions – high end, it’s a choice between Gnome and KDE – mid-tier has Xfce, LXQt, Mate, Cinnamon, and more – limited hardware go for IceWM, JWM, FLWM, or similar – want to get your hands dirty? go for a tiling window manager
• X11 is (effectively) abandonware at this point – it’s still getting security patches, but the devs left and started Wayland 17-ish years ago
• XLibre is more political than technical – and I’ll leave it at that

I’ve had a couple systems that started with nothing more than vi, but rather more that started with nano (don’t think I’ve come across any that started with vim) – that being said, I’ll tolerate vi long enough to get micro installed

(now if AppImages would work on musl systems …)

(paraphrased) “The user of the illegal service may fund the activities of criminal organisations, says Executive Director Jaana Pihkala from the copyright organisation TTVK.”

as opposed to paying the even more criminal publishers scalping the rights and screwing the creators

XFCE users looking around worriedly – can you please not mess with GTK? … please?

…

…

so … um, I’ve been hearing nice things about LXQT lately?

Debian Bookworm – yes, it’s boring – but that also means no surprises or gotchas – it just keeps truckin’ along

EDIT: if you ever do feel Arch-curious, start with EndeavourOS instead

not like Google has already tried and abandoned several instant messaging options over the years or anything …