How’s the performance for media on that thing? I was eying up the surface go line to replace an android tablet that I mostly use for playing movies and TV shows I’ve downloaded. Think it would do okay playing back 1080p and higher content?

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Sorry, still not understanding your position, can you explain a bit more about your troubles and problems? Then many of us here can help you.

Explain more, I don’t understand.

They have a Linux GUI, though admittedly I’ve never used it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html

Rufus, the bootable usb creator?

You should be able to natively do what Rufus does in Linux, if you have a disk imaging software installed. I think Ubuntu comes with gnome-disks, you right click an ISO file, click open with, select disk image writer, and select the destination device (your USB drive) and it writes the ISO file to the USB device. You should double check it actually makes it bootable, but I think it does.

You can also use Ventoy to do what you want. You install it to the USB drive and then just drop the ISO files into a folder that you want to boot from, and it creates a menu for you to choose which ISO file to choose at boot time.

I’m not sure I would agree for arch if the OP wants low maintenance. I’ve never run it myself, but the way I’ve heard arch described is the further you go without regular updates the more likely you are to have a problem when you do update.

Aren’t most app configurations and settings saved in the user’s .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?

/home/[username]/.config/

I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we’re just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script

sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc…

if we’re talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used