Garuda. It’s even easier than Manjaro. The theming can be a bit much, though.

Aside from your preference for debian-based distros, you’re describing Garuda pretty well. But the chaotic-AUR is enabled by default, so you’d never need to hunt for .deb files in the first place. And the update script, “garuda-update”, has a bunch of nice features by default, like taking snapshots and running grub-update (which would have prevented the grub fiasco that hit the arch-based distros a while back).

The only pain points are 1.) If you don’t like Garuda’s theming, you’ll need to do some minor ricing to start, and 2.) Plasma 6 updates often enough that on a rolling release distro, something minor about your setup might break once every few months, e.g. KDE allows themes to set a minimum taskbar size and all of a sudden your taskbar increases in size, or your wallpaper gets reset for some reason.

KDE, because I’m too lazy to switch back to XFCE, which offered every feature I already use in KDE except without the stuttering, the bugs, and the update cycle that breaks things way, way too often on a rolling release distro.

Or openbox. My old laptop has openbox, but that’s more for screwing around with EWW than doing day-to-day things.

Pretty much any distro can do everything you want. But since you liked crunchbang, consider Mabox. It’s an openbox distro based on Manjaro with a bunch of QoL improvements like super+arrow to tile a window, or their own little fork of jgmenu to expand the functionality of the tint2 panel, plus some custom ricing tools. I’m not saying it’s the best distro ever, but it might give you just the right nostalgic feels.

I guess RAM is a bell curve now.

• 32GB: Enough.
• 16GB: Not enough.
• 8GB: Not enough.
• 4GB: Believe it or not, enough.

Technically, hippos don’t swim. They run along the ground. So if you pick a deep enough body of water, you might still have a chance.

Last time I distrohopped, this was actually one of my main benchmarks. If I couldn’t install Librewolf in under a minute, I picked a different distro.

Honestly, there are probably enough people using ublock with tor browser that you can still retain most of the benefits if you do the same. You’ll just be in a smaller cohort than if you didn’t.

To play devil’s advocate, yes, “w” is technically three syllables in English, but they’re easy enough to blur together. Meanwhile, the actual “w” sound is comparatively labor intensive, and “-orld” even more so. We’re in purple burglar alarm world.

Stable, in this context, just means “point release”. If you meant “doesn’t break”, that describes most rolling release distros.

…unless you’ve used KDE in the last month. Holy cow, just let me alt-tab into a fullscreen window without throwing a fit.

I don’t hate flatpaks, but flatpaks require more disk space than the same apps from traditional repositories, and they only support a handful of the most common default themes. Since I only ever use older and slower computers, my disk space is limited, and I like to rice my desktop, I personally avoid them. But your use-case may differ.

You’re thinking in reverse. Walled gardens keep you in, not out. Without logging into your Steam account (pretending you don’t have one), try to download a mod for a game you bought on GOG and see how it goes for you.

This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don’t see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it’s in their monetary interest to do so.

I played with Endeavor years ago, but not extensively. If memory serves, it’s pretty much just preconfigured Arch with some nice theming, a Calamares installer, and a few simple scripts. Garuda adds even more theming (too much for my tastes, actually), a few GUI utilities, notifications when your system is overdue for an update, and an update script that runs common post-update tasks (like grub-install) and takes snapper snapshots automatically, so basically user-friendly bloat.

Disclaimer: I’m incredibly ignorant. Wouldn’t wireless necessarily mean high-latency?

If you like arch but want a plug’n play distro, just do a plug’n play arch-based distro. Garuda is braindead easy.

It does not run well. You can’t see the performance difference between KDE and XFCE on neofetch, but you absolutely can on on old machine.

Source: I have an old computer.

Mabox!

Enable the chaotic AUR and you won’t even have to build from source.

Linux is modular, not fragmented.

Except Gnome. Fuck Gnome.