Since you have experience with Mint, why not go with Debian with KDE Plasma? I have it on my laptop and it’s Debian, old reliable, I like that stability on a laptop, so that I’m less likely to have issues on the go. Debian isn’t the friendliest distro to new users, sure, but if you can figure out Fedora, you can figure out Debian.

Live past 35.

Dude, you have a serious problem, man. That’s way too much marijuanas.

I spare very little mental capacity to how people utilize their computers where it doesn’t directly affect me. No, it is not something I find worth being bothered about. Life’s hard enough regardless.

Oh yeah, KDE Plasma is where it’s at. I love the DE. Glad you found something that works for you!

Yeah, Canonical has been sketchy for a long time. And every now and then they make a move that just reminds me why I stay away from Ubuntu.

Yeah, that’s how I do it every morning.

Sometimes, when the ol’ 'puter is cranky, I have to press the reset button, which is really small, and it’s difficult to hit it with my toe (I have to do some tricky nail work, not for beginners), but I’ll be damned if I ever reach down and use my fingers.

Whoops, I made a typo. I’ll leave it in.

Is this a programming of physics joke?

I’ll throw my vote in with Fedora KDE Plasma. The fact you run it will absolutely help with any possible troubleshooting, and Plasma is IMO great for anyone coming from Windows. Fedora, from my experience, doesn’t throw many curve balls your way either.

Good luck with your friend’s transition!

Likely not. I’ve tried skipping a release once by accident (I didn’t pay enough attention) and it ended with a bricked system and a full reinstall. Don’t do it.

I’d say it didn’t fail. It was never really a consumer phone. It was an attempt to get hardware in the hands of developers, and it achieved that.

Other posts here discuss why it didn’t receive wider adoption.

I daily drove my PinePhone until I could no longer receive MMS messages, since my service provider has a different APN for the internet and MMS. That, and the modem became more unreliable over time. I like my PinePhone, but an average user would never adopt it as it is.

This brought to mind a collection of asshole admin stories from the early internet. With a bit of googling, it was The Bastard Operator From Hell. God, I haven’t thought of those since the 90s. I can’t believe I could even recall something like that.

Anyway, fuck users.

Use Wayland!

Depends wholly on the situation. Right now, I needed Windows for a piece of hardware with no Linux support, so I installed Windows and just steamrolled my earlier openSUSE Leap installation. I will now dual boot with Debian for a while until I no longer need Windows.

When switching distros, you can usually copy your config files over. Or you can have a separate /home partition that doesn’t get wiped. This can cause issues though, due to version and structural differences between distros.

Personally, I only save what I absolutely need, like say browser bookmarks, and prefer to just get a fresh start. So, I just wipe everything. How you want to go about it is up to what you feel comfortable with, however. There’s rarely any one true way to do things in Linux. Free as in Freedom.

Always remember to backup any data before switching distros though. Always.

Oh yeah, gonna slap that bad boy on my laptop soon.

No, no, I’m sure that if we just deregulate harder the invisible hand of the free market will take care of it. Any day now.

openSUSE and Fedora with Plasma will be fine choices for you, based your post. Tumbleweed will take a bit more work, but usually it’s nothing too difficult. You can also go with Leap, which generally won’t have the same issues Tumbleweed has. I personally use Tumbleweed and like it a lot.

Fedora is just an all around solid distro, endorsed by Linus Torvalds himself! In my opinion, since you already have some experience with it, stick with Fedora. It’ll be fine.

My choice of distro is just a compromise and close enough to serving my needs. All distros have pros and cons, and I use different distros for different use cases.

Gentoo is great. I used it for a few years 20 years ago and I still think the package manager is the best I’ve ever used. I wouldn’t use Gentoo today, but I’m really glad I went through the install and maintenance process. It didn’t make me a guru, but I did learn a thing or two about Linux.