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
Yea to be frank I also love the simplicity of Gnome. I do apreciate its qualities. It's consistent, I get that it tries to offer a streamlined experience. I find it sacrifices a lot to get there though. The lack of flexibilty (by default without extensions) wrt window/workspace management feels a bit crippling. I do appreciate the consistency. But that's not enough for me to make up for other aspects. And for the overhanging feeling that it's so strongly opinionated, it might just diverge from your sensibilities at some point, without warning.
Yea, the single fact that we're able to talk about this is a testament to the choice... 👌🏼 Pretty cool. All in all I may like Plasma better, there are true dealbreakers that make its usage impossible for me (tbc). Anyway. For now I work under Windows11. Whatever works