Which is on Earth. Which is in Canada.

It looks like one of you is treating the other as a person deserving of respectful conversation.

That is to say, Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Regular Mint is still based on Ubuntu.

the jangling keys

So historically not manjaro.

I think you’re treating this like a pit fight.

You say “dries up” like that wasn’t always the end goal for rideshare apps. Disrupt, overtake, starve out, hike prices.

Debian.

That’s weird.
To share a contrasting experience, I run KDE on Wayland on a laptop with two physical monitors with different rotations and three virtual monitors with different resolutions and it all Just Works.

I’m a teapot

Means “I leave this as an exercise for the reader to figure out”

I don’t think you can just QED your way out of that one

If your only two options are hostile or silent, let’s go with silent.

Terrible timing. Just like the WonderSwan.

I miss Zip Disks. Those things were so cool and so outclassed by perpendicular progress.

It was probably from before Debian included the non-free firmware in the installation media, so you had to scramble to put those on a floppy disk or something, all while your system was out of commission.

You can jump to 25.10 for the short-term release, and there’s a preview available for 26.04 (officially releases in April), both of which have Wayland by default in Plasma and I believe Gnome.
Though I would strongly recommend you try Debian, version 13 (Trixie) includes Plasma 6 and of course Wayland by default.
It’s a bright future.

They did. It’s Wayland. Everything should work in Wayland now. It’s the default for everything, even xfce (4.20+), and x compatibility is handled by xwayland.

THAT WAS REAL???

There are some very convincing Windows themes. Gnome, too. There are a couple to make it look exactly like the IRIX theme, or CDE.
Personally, I think the default layout is plenty simple. You press the applications icon, you press on the thing you want, that thing opens.
If you can take twenty seconds to set it up for them, run everything they’ll ever want to run, right-click on it in the task bar, click Pin to Task Manager.
Then all they’ll ever need to do is poke the one they want to run and it runs.
KDE also has a Mobile DE called Plasma Mobile. Looks like it can be installed on desktops and laptops too.

I’d say KDE Plasma 6 with one of the one-button global theme modifications can do everything you’re promising, while resulting in a simpler and more familiar layout.
More options help everyone, whether they use them or not.