Mikelius

Not an opinion, I have an actual situation with my eyes where they twitch uncontrollably when presented with bright lights for a long period of time. I have tried minimum screen brightness, lowered contrast/colors, auto brightness based on the environment, various software solutions to removing blue light 24/7 from the screen - none of it worked. Went permanently dark theme on everything, magically eyes haven’t twitched in years.

Light theme vs dark theme is not just a preference, it’s an actual accessibility need for some of us.

The NoScript list terrifies me a little though… Not sure what’s going on there, but that’s a lot of JavaScript lol.

Rarely do I find software I need that’s not in the repo, but when I do, I just dusky build it myself. Not at my machine now, but I think I only have one PPA that’s not default added. In the other cases where I don’t want to build the app, it tends to be in Flatpak too.

That being said, although Mint is technically based on Ubuntu, it really doesn’t feel like it at all. I personally can’t stand Ubuntu, but again all personal opinions. If Debian-based systems didn’t work for you and an arch based distro did, then go with it. Everyone’s needs are their own and that’s why we have so many choices :D

I’m a Linux mint user for my main system and am no beginner. As others have said, it’s friendly to both beginners and advanced users, it’s good to see you’ve made that choice.

That being said, don’t stop there. Whether it’s in a virtual machine or some old laptop, also try one of the “from scratch” systems. I went with Gentoo and that is the root of where a ton of my Linux knowledge started. It’s my favorite distro simply because it has that history for me. You’ll find everyone has their own favorites for their own reasons, so be sure to explore and find the one that you enjoy and helps you learn.

Been using Gentoo on my server for over a decade now and probably won’t ever leave the compiling front, especially with a 12-core/24-thread CPU making it go as quick as regular binary updates on my mint laptop… But that being said, in happy to see them considering to do this. It’ll bring in some folks who are afraid of (or just dislike) compiling everything from source. I think the biggest packages that’d benefit from this are definitely the browsers and desktop environments.

My comment on arch is just related to the use of black arch for a regular desktop or laptop machine, not my server (no desktop environment for the server). Was mostly trying it to compare it with Kali, actually.

Black arch does come with xfce by default indeed, but resizing windows isn’t available right away. At least it wasn’t when I tried it a couple of years ago. It required changing a bunch of configurations manually for whatever reason.

Never tried regular Arch after trying Black Arch, so not sure if they’re the same feel, but after realizing the work it would take just to be given the capability to resize windows in the UI instead of just coming with drag and resize out of the box, Black Arch was a huge no go for me… Which kept me from wanting to touch regular Arch, lol. That being said, I go nope to Ubuntu the most. Gentoo is my favorite and is what my server has been running for the past decade without any kind of issue, but for laptop and daily use, I use Mint. Been on that one for about a decade now too… Used to use Peppermint (that still a thing?) and Suse the most before those.

I don’t use those two flags, but have several pis running docker with no issues. They’ve been running (almost) 24/7/365 going on maybe 2 years now with the same sd cards.

Check out the latest Protectli devices. They have 2.5g ports on them and are very powerful little machines.