Edit: It works! Not beautiful and shows a concerning amount of "Error" lines on startup but it will do. I got VSCodium and ESP-IDF running, at least – and CMake isn't awfully slow despite it being a crappy 4GB RAM machine (not easily upgradeable). The first boot took a while and I haven't rebooted since, I guess it will be below 30 seconds next time (Mint on same machine but HDD was about 1 minute).
Edit: I hope I chose the right kernel here, surprisingly not much info online on this! Also, I picked "targeted" because the 10-year-old system does not use any cutting-edge hardware and all drivers should be auto-detected, I think.
After some experience with Linux Mint, I gathered the courage to try another distro. I'd like to turn an old laptop into an IPTV receiver plus FTP/OpenVPN/HomeAssistant server with occasional desktop use. I first installed Windows 11 just in case my family needs to use it (it fucking sucks, the built-in PS/2 keyboard doesn't work half the time but that's an issue for later) but now I'll be turning it into a dual-boot setup with Debian as the primary option. Please give me some encouragement, I'm really afraid of new things.
Old pic: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d4bf0222-4fc1-42ab-a3e9-464087dec3af.png
Yeah, I probably wouldn't buy a new laptop for a server, but it's a great way to re-use what would otherwise be e-waste. I have a 20 year old laptop running as a server, currently just for FoundryVTT, but it works great. 4GB of DDR2 ram, Intel celeron dual core cpu. I stuck a new ssd in it (old hdd died) and it works great, as long as I don't run any graphical interfaces while I have the server running. One ram stick was bad, but DDR2 cost me about $11. Total hardware cost was around $50 USD.
Thinking about just removing the lid entirely, since I don't use it graphically (I can hook up a monitor if absolutely needed).