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
It seems like the answer might be something like "it's too different from windows! 😡😡😡"
Yea sure 😁 think before you prejudice !
FYI, I'm not hating. Criticism should be a fine thing to do, enjoyed by all parties, respectful and all. See my other replies for my opinion. I swear it's not terrible, and you're free to discuss it.
Your other replies come off a bit more tempered admittedly. As for me, gnome annoys me in a few ways but I've adjusted to most of them and I just couldn't get past the initial steps of customization on KDE. I would honestly prefer to have another option and to use both but I couldn't see it working out for me. I'm like you, I definitely prefer that another option than my preference exists. Perhaps a future version will win me over. And even if not, choice is good.
I reread myself and I said Gnome is shit, lol. not exactly the best opener I admit. The set up on a new install is time consuming but I know Linux relies on config files a lot so there must be a way to carry things over from a previous install. I haven't looked into it yet, it's such a learning curve