Hey! It's time for me to go back to Linux, I used it a lot about 15 years ago, Ubuntu at the tjme, but I haven't really kept up with everything. I have pretty specific needs so I hope someone knows the best option for me.
I have an old and shitty laptop so I only do a few things with it. Here's what I use it for, needs and preferences:
• I use Shadow for most things like gaming, creative stuff and anything else my potato can't handle, so the Shadow app needs to work well.
• I exclusively download entertainment via MEGA so the MEGA app needs to work.
• I use Spotify for music.
As for wishes about UX and UI. I like a MacOS style more than Windows, but I'm happy to try and play around with anything. I'm not huge on keyboard navigation, my back is kinda bad so using only the mouse or even a gamepad is what works best. I use a couple of different gamepads, but since it's mostly for Shadow and I forward the USB directly to it, I hope it should work no matter what distro.
I tried Pop!_OS but both the Shadow and MEGA apps were almost completely broken, both the ones from the Pop!_Shop and apps from their websites. I also didn't like the UX that much.
I have downloaded Linux Mint, but thought I should ask here before going ahead with installing it, it looks nice thought!
I want something that's as "ready to go" as possible, not too much fixing with drivers etc. I should be able to handle most things that come up, but I have limited mental energy to sit and fix stuff for hours and days.
I'm a sucker for good design and eye candy like blurred transparency etc. But it's definitely not a must, especially considering the limited hardware.
So, any recommendations and/or thoughts?
Thanks!
The thing with Debian distros (like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS) is that they're extremely stable releases. This does not necessarily mean everything "just works", but rather that they will not experience major code changes that could disrupt a working system. This means that if some apps don't work out of the box, that state is going to be pretty much the same in any distro based on the same Debian version.
A more "agile" distro might be less stable, but as a result could see some updates to apps that Debian is still lagging behind on. Fedora is probably the "next step" in this direction: it's still reliable but gets updates more frequently than Debian (it's sort of a "proving ground" for code before it gets pulled into Red Hat, which is a distro focused on long-term stability).
As for desktop environments: I've always thought GNOME was the most Mac-like DE, but KDE has enough configuration options that you can kind of turn it into anything you want. Since this is on a very old laptop, you might consider LXDE, which isn't the prettiest DE, but it's super lightweight and might let you squeeze out a bit more performance if you're wasting a lot of compute power just rendering the desktop.