Chicago95 XFCE on Debian is my daily driver. Having been a Windows 2000 fanboy, it makes me feel right at home.

The Raleigh GTK theme ported to GTK 3 on XFCE is also a quick and dirty way to get a 90s-esque look: https://github.com/thesquash/gtk-theme-raleigh

For an entire distro, there’s Hot Dog Linux: https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG

Many of them are single-issue Linux users and don’t concern themselves with FOSS philosophy

Also have been using Debian for the past 3 years. It just works on all of my machines and comes with just enough features to make life easy. Also love the variety of packages and compatibility with pretty much anything I need that isn’t in the official repo.

Many would beg to differ but I love how stable and predictable it is. I have a very particular taste in UI and the less work to maintain that cozy look, the better. Having been a holdout on old Windows versions in the years before I moved to Linux, getting new features at all is already very exciting. I had thought for several years that nothing would beat the comfort and reliability of Windows 2000, but Debian proved me wrong.

If just using the Live CD counts, Lubuntu 12.04, to copy files off a broken Windows machine

Then Ubuntu, followed by Deepin (looked cool), UbuntuDDE, Arch, Xubuntu, and finally settled on Debian in 2022.

In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I’ve had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.

Customizations, especially theming, at the system level. Or just learning to modify system files on an atomic distro, in general.

I’m sure it’s doable and I am genuinely interested in moving to atomic/immutable distros. But more for the security aspect than reliability as I’ve yet to break my install of Linux in a way that takes more than an hour to recover from. I’ve enjoyed the predictability of Debian and my very particular taste in UI makes for additional baggage just reinstalling, let alone moving to a very different distro.

• 180 MB /efi (if needed)
• 384 MB /boot (for LUKS compatibility)
• Remainder / (usually btrfs)

It’s certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn’t much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a ‘personal multiseat’ configuration out of the box.

I’d suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can’t say I’ve any experience with them.

If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there’s a couple of hurdles:

• Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed
• Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections
• Very high RAM usage
• Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM
• Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.

Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn’t given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro’s repo, not NVIDIA’s website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.

Debian stable:

• Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
• Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
• I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
• I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

I didn’t

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

When maximizing uptime, Debian is the no-fuss way to go.

Well said. LUKS implements AES-256, which is also entrusted by the U.S. government and various other governments to protect data from state and non-state adversaries.

Possibly overestimating the value of the data entrusted to me, but whenever I see that xkcd, I like to think that I at least have the option to remain silent and die with dignity if I really don’t want the contents of my disk out there.

I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

It went something along the lines of:

1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
6. Cross my fingers and reboot

The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.

It’s nice getting a glimpse as to what fraction of Linux users are using disk encryption. Full disk encryption is becoming the default on mainstream OSes, but not in most of the Linux installers I’ve encountered. Always made me curious just how many people went out of their way to encrypt their Linux install.

I personally encrypt everything except for VMs already in an encrypted device or USB drives that need to work with non-Linux machines. It’d be interesting to hear what other people’s reasons to encrypt their disks or not are.

Biolinum O for desktop

Liberation Mono for terminal