It is a somewhat old-fashioned choice these days, but Arctic Silver 5 paste is still my go-to. It is very thick and not prone to pump-out or dry-out. I have systems that I have taken apart where the paste was still tacky a good 5-6 years later. I think some modern pastes are a degree or two cooler, but for a 15W U-series CPU I do not think that is as much of a concern.

Most tutorials online will be for desktop CPUs and will tell you to put a pea-sized bead in the center and press down, but this is more suitable for desktop CPUs with an integrated heat spreader and not laptop CPUs, which are typically direct die application and would probably either leave a ton of excess paste from a pea-sized dot, or risk an exposed corner for a smaller dot.

For direct die, I would suggest spreading an even layer of paste from edge to edge of the die using the edge of an old credit card or the like. You want to avoid stirring up the paste too much in order to avoid introducing air bubbles which could cause localized hot spots on the die.

1. There is no shame in dual booting. That will give you the freedom to find alternatives for everything in your workflow until you stop needing to boot into Windows at all. The preferred way is with a separate physical drive, because windows updates will sometimes overwrite the ESP partition or do other weird things which could break your Linux install.

2. Not an expert in that, sorry. There are plenty of articles online for alternatives for all of those.

3. Linux has no trouble reading NTFS. I have an NTFS network drive, and on my dual boot laptop I can simply reach into the NTFS partition on my second drive and grab files from it from Linux (Windows cannot read the Linux drive, though).

4. Not sure on those specific models, but I have a Behringer UM2 and Linux detects and works with it just fine.

Sounds reasonable.

The Samsung 870 EVO should be comparable, if not even slightly better than the MX500 (1GB DRAM cache for the 870 vs 512MB for the MX500, and rated for 600TBW instead of 360TBW for the MX500). Samsung had a spate of failures with their 990 NVMe drives a while back, but aside from that they have a good reputation for reliability overall. I used one of the prior-generation 860 EVO drives in a laptop of mine for years and never had an issue.

Team Group is a decent budget brand in my book. Taiwanese-based memory seller who make both SSDs and RAM, even micro SD cards and flash drives. They have an actual product portfolio instead of just one or two models like the no-name drives. I have used their 4TB MP34 pcie gen 3 drives before with good success (now discontinued, but at one time they were one of the cheapest DRAM-cache NVMe drives available), and I have one of their MP44 gen 4 HMB drives in my current laptop.

I am not aware of any SATA SSDs which use HMB, so I am not sure if it would work correctly through an adapter. I think the choice for 2.5" SSDs is generally between DRAM cache SSDs and ones with SLC caching, which are typically much cheaper. I think both are pretty much able to saturate the ~500MB/s bandwidth of a SATA III connection, but may run into issues with prolonged writes or when getting very close to full.

Looking on Newegg, for DRAM cache units, things like the Samsung 870 evo and Crucial MX500 cost ~$90 or so for the 1TB model.

SLC cache units like the Crucial BX500 or Team Group CX2 are much less, more like $50-60 USD. The Team Group one claims 800TBW endurance for the 1TB model. I do not know if I believe that, but generally speaking I have used their nvme drives before and have not had any fail on me, for what that small data point is worth.

Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.

Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.

I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

I’ve literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.

AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.

I don’t think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.

I can’t really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.

XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I’m sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.

I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.

ClamAV

But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.

My first distro was an Arch fork and I moved to vanilla Arch a year later. My problems in that time have been minimal. Personally, I am glad that someone recommended that I use an arch-based distro as a beginner. Mind you, I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn. I think for those types of people it can be appropriate to recommend Arch-based distros.

So, yes, if you are not willing to google a problem, read a wiki, or use the terminal once in a while, Arch or its forks are probably not for you. I would probably not recommend Arch as a distro for someone’s elderly grandparent or someone not comfortable with computers.

That said, I do not know that I agree with the assertion that Arch “breaks all the time,” or that I even understand what “Arch bullshit®” is referring to. This overblown stereotype that Arch is some kind of mythical distro only a step removed from Linux From Scratch has to stop. None of that has been my experience for the last 4 years. Actually, if anything, it is the forks that get dependency issues (looking at you, Manjaro) and vanilla Arch has been really solid for me.

I think it is not possible to avoid it in all cases, but the reputation and business practices of the controlling company are your best indicator. Any changes to a company’s culture may give signs if a piece of software may start to employ anti-consumer tactics.

Naturally, being closed source and in a dominant market position (i.e. a monopoly or near-monopoly) would make it easy for a company to start pulling these kinds of tactics. Sometimes even formerly reputable companies with open source software can try to do things like this after buyouts, changes in management, pressure from capital investors to increase profits, etc.

Generally, open source programs will be harder to monetize than closed source programs, as someone can fork the code and take out the disliked features. See Ungoogled chromium vs Google Chrome, VSCodium vs VSCode, Rocky Linux vs RHEL, etc.

Manjaro was my first distro. I used a number of AUR packages and ran into excessive dependency issues due to Manjaro’s packages being held back and often a version or two behind. This eventually led me to switch to vanilla arch. Unless one plans on not using any AUR packages at all, I do not recommend it.

Manjaro also uses the pamac gui package manager, which has a bit of a history of “DDoS”-ing the AUR with excessive requests. Apparently, the search field in pamac would begin querying the AUR after every letter typed to try and populate autocomplete results, hammering it with requests. Pamac also does not distinguish between package repos, so even just having AUR enabled and searching for a regular repo package would send requests to the AUR. Apparently it got so bad that it took down the AUR and they started returning 403 to requests from pamac users. In fact, this happened a second time and got them blocked again. This got the Manjaro devs in bad graces with a number of Linux folks as it was not a bug, but a poor design choice.

If it has an ethernet port (or perhaps a USB to ethernet dongle), maybe a PiHole DNS using Debian or the like? It is apparently supported on other Linux distros than Raspbian.

If it supports micro SD XC (i.e. capacities higher than 32GB) or you have a USB hard drive or high capacity USB flash drive, maybe a samba server for file storage? I often use my file server as a substitute for digging out a flash drive any time I want to quickly pass a file between two machines in my house.

Do you have the bolt and plasma-thunderbolt packages installed? I believe I had to do that to use a thunderbolt SSD enclosure/docks with my laptop. I am not sure about DP alt mode, though.

Arch w/ KDE gamer here. I have generally had a good experience with it. I think everything you said is generally accurate. In terms of customization, lack of bloat, and a good wiki, Arch is generally considered to be all of those things. A rolling distro like Arch I believe will also be getting the latest proton updates, which may help with sooner game compatibility/optimization updates on more recent releases.

I say go for it.

Yes, but my larger point is that you are doing the same thing, but in the negative. You are taking your specific problems and then putting forward the conclusion that they are the reasons why “regular” Linux users should not use Linux, as though these were universal problems. I am saying that I do not have those issues and that they are far from universal.

Yes, the modular nature of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. There is legitimate debate to be had on that. But that is not how your post frames the issue.

As stated above, not all of these things are even Linux problems. I would say that if iOS refuses to play nice with Linux but every other ecosystem works fine, the blame lies with Apple, not with Linux. It is not Linux’s job to fix the interoperability problems of other ecosystems. The GNOME problems are related to a specific subset of Linux users, and even before today I would have said that I would not recommend GNOME to new users because of how nonstandard it can be.

I am looking through these issues and I cannot say that I can relate on almost any of these. Sorry to hear you have been having so many issues!

I do plenty of gaming and cannot think of a time where I have had GPU driver issues (despite the fact that I have Nvidia graphics on 3 out of 4 of my systems, which is supposedly more problematic).

My bluetooth works fine, and it has been literally years since an update broke something, bluetooth or otherwise (which I cannot say the same for Windows on my work computer).

I use KDE connect, SFTP, and SMB servers and I have never had any issues transferring files between Windows, Android, and Linux. What do you mean about that? (seeing other replies, it sounds like you are using iOS. That sounds like that may be an Apple problem and not a Linux problem, because Apple tend to be terrible about playing nice with other ecosystems)

The scaling is the one point I can sort of relate on. I think there is still some work to be done regarding DPI and scaling on Linux, but it’s not enough of an issue to make me want to switch operating systems.

As for GNOME issues and window decorations, that sounds like a GNOME problem. GNOME does things very differently to all of the other DEs and forces programs to manually define their own window decorations rather than allowing standard default icons like other DEs, so my understanding is that GNOME in particular tends to be a source of constant headaches for Linux developers.

And I’m not some sysadmin or CS major. If I have a problem, I do a web search. If I can’t find it there, I make a forum thread. I don’t post a rant saying that Linux is a bad OS, lol.

I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would “never, ever break down.”

I am not sure, then. If you are on a laptop, you might try one or the other of those utilities regardless simply because they can improve battery life, but that is a separate issue.

Interesting. Do you use Powertop or TLP, by any chance? Some power utilities will turn on USB power saving if there is no activity on a USB port for a while, which can cause issues with USB mice. Generally I turn off that specific setting, or I believe there might be some way to whitelist certain USB devices to not have this sleep behavior.