Navidrome does that. You have to setup a PC, or a raspberry Pi with navidrome, and then use a client like Symfonium (costs $5, not open source, but it's the best subsonic client out there), and tell it to automatically downconvert music when played via the phone. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B+, with just 1 GB of RAM, running navidrome. DietPi + navidrome (which is installable directly via dietpi's software selection), together they take just 80-120 MB of RAM!

I had Jellyfin before that, and Emby, and they were dogs. 1 GB of RAM was not enough for them, they'd swap with an additional 200-300 MB of RAM. And they were slow with large music libraries too. Navidrome/Subsonic don't have such issues. Big music libraries are handled fast with their db/engine.

If you prefer to not use a server, there are encoding shell scripts that do batch-encoding: https://github.com/caleis/flac2mp3/blob/master/flac2mp3.sh

The biggest problem of ubuntu is snaps.

However, if you're into audio, you can install linux mint, which is ubuntu-based, and then install the ubuntu-studio-pipewire-something (sorry, can't remember how the package is actually called), which FIXES pipewire to work properly with high end audio apps. For example, on my vanilla Linux Mint, Bitwig Studio would not make a peep! After installing that package, it produces sound. With that fixed, you can do everything on Mint.

Just install XFce (no need to reinstall the OS). XFce is very themeable.

You know, putting up a black theme on your desktop environment is not difficult, you can probably find some online for your DE. The problem is the screen of your laptop/PC. Unless your laptop/monitor is a very expensive one, or a Mac, chances are you're using a cheaper panel. And slapping a 100% black theme there won't make it as black as you imagine it to be (as in your phone, for example, which usually use good quality screens).

Everyone says Godot, but I disagree. Godot is too high level and it won't teach you much about how it all works. Godot is good if you have already mastered languages and common gaming algorithms (e.g. collisions), and you just want to get going. But as a first foray, I'd say, go with SDL. After you done something simple in SDL and learned some hands on knowledge on how things work under the hood, go with Godot or Love. That knowledge will help you troubleshoot godot better then.

It works but be careful with wifi. The other user said that it works out of the box with endeavourOS, and I know you can install it later with Linux Mint too, but the problem is that this wifi driver for the older chips (from 2011 to 2013 at least) is buggy. In my 2011 macbook air it would crash the whole OS on heavy downloads, and on my 2012 one it won't come up from sleep. So I bought a super tiny supported usb wifi dongle to deal with the problem. Now my two macbook airs work 100% with Linux.

My 2015 macbook air works great with the linux wifi driver, but it has no web cam support, and the driver on github is buggy and not updated for newer kernels anymore.

I installed OpenSuSE Slowroll yesterday. I felt underwhelmed by their bad documentation. Their nvidia installation driver wiki was wrong, and resulted in the drivers not working (not all packages were pulled through via dependencies). I opened a bug report and they did a few changes to the wiki very fast (thanks to a nice suse engineer), but the overall wiki page remains utterly convoluted. And I'm mentioning this because even if you might not have to deal with nvidia, the rest of the system receives the same care. YaST is an eye sore with the worst UIX ever designed by man. And after installing the drivers and updating the system, now systemd takes 1.30 minutes to journald it -- out of nowhere. It's just a weird distro, with no attention to detail for end users, imho.

Regarding Bazzite, is a gaming distro. If you only play 1 kind of game that works with Mint, stay with Mint (or Debian-stable).

Wine will never work properly for apps. Sure, it manages to load a few apps, but they are crashy. Reimplementing the Windows API is a massive task that won't finish for decades. So I suggest you use Linux-native apps instead. I moved from Photoshop to gimp3 too, even if I had the last non-subscription version on CD and it kinda worked with wine (but not really). Same with Affinity Photo, that many people suggest to run on wine, it's super crashy on wine. So, avoid windows apps via wine. Games do work because they use very little of the windows api.

In other words, stay with what you know works without headaches (Mint), and move to native Linux apps, and Steam for games. I've been using Linux since 1998 and I'm comfortable with the terminal too, but I don't enjoy having troubling installations. I'm at age now that I want things to just work.

Burn a usb with memtest and try that. Only after you have removed suspicion of your RAM being bad, go to the next thing to investigate.

Linux Mint is the answer for every newbie coming from Windows. You install the faenza-icon-theme from the repo which is not flat, you turn off the autohiding of the scrollbars (they have a gui for it), you turn off tap-n-drag which can wreck havoc (via dconf), do a few other quality of life changes (like the new cinnamon theme), and she should be happy with it. Just make sure you install a newer kernel (from the update app, there's a menu item for it), so this newer laptop is better supported.

I personally also install Cinnamenu instead of the default menu, and configure it to be super simple like this: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/391/944/352/704/129/original/7e2ced150dbc8932.png It's so much more usable than the default cinnamon menu that has small icons.

They're trying to kill counterculture. Pixelfed is also banned at meta's servers.

Reading the bug report about all that ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/issues/288 ), it's crazy to see how the gnome dev (Red Hat employee) replies to the issue. He completely ignores the issue in the beginning, then that he doesn't care to follow the spec because it's "old", and yet, he still advertises to the OS as an fdo theme, so OSes ship with it. He's hurting non-gnome apps, and he simply doesn't seem to care about it. To me, this shows a person who simply doesn't care about ecosystem.

Linux also surpassed 10% in my country, Greece (10.72%).

I prepared a couple of old laptops I had around recently, to gift to my niece and cousin, and I put Debian with XFce in both of them. Worked great. And I think that's why Linux is big in Greece. Consider that when someone buys a car here, they use it until the end of its life. Very rarely they sell cars to get something new. The average car is 15 years old in Greece. I think that's the deal with old laptops and computers too: people try to extend the lives of their machines.