Sunoc

This.

In my experience, once you have the potential hardware compatibility issue fixed, it’s smooth sailing and simply a matter of getting used to the different tools on Linux!

I haven’t tried it myself but GrapheneOS supports the Pixel Tablet, so that might be an option! Not sure if the hardware meets your needs but it should be top notch regarding security and privacy!

Other systems should not be able to see your data on a Linux install as long as the disk is encrypted, which is proposed during the install of many distros.

AFAIU, ransomware will try to lock all devices, USB drives, etc, so no, your Linux install is not safe from that if it is on the same machine. Even machine on the same network might be at risk.

How to prevent ? Backup! Loosing your entire machine data should not be an issue but just a matter of re-installing the OS and recovering your data from a backup. Have at least two backup, including one outside of your house.

About dualbooting though… Putting Windows + anything else on a single drive is a really bad idea and Windows WILL try and take over it, at least breaking the boot partition. More concerning, and it actually happened to me recently: when putting a Linux on one disk and Windows on an other in the same machine, the Windows somehow still managed to break the Linux boot partition…

So if you can afford it and really want to have both OS, you should try and have two machines or at least install Linux on a drive that you can easily unplug.

I hope this will be helpful, good luck!

It’s atomic Fedora with KDE

Plan 9 it is !

PARAGRAPHS, mf! Do you speak it?!

Always advocating for that but Aeon Desktop (immutable OpenSUSE) has been great for me: rock solid base system, latest Gnome desktop, all the apps in Flatpak. Distrobox for all the terminal applications needs works better for me than the toolbox on systems like Silverblue. Give it a try!

Cute gekko

Trisquel provides a good experience out of the box imo, as long as your hardware is supported and if you don’t mind the dated looking interface. I used it for a while on my corebooted laptop.

I didn’t used much any other “100% libre” distros. As much as I wanted to use it, I never managed to have Guix to run on that machine.

[edit:] to answer OP’s question, I would use a distro that ships with it.

Neat! I used it as well but I would rather use dwm or xfce recently.

Got it. Thanks you! I might actually get one and try to go immutable on it…

Aeon btw. Immutable, rolling, no bs. Everything in Flatlaks or Distrobox is really a killer combo imo.

Hell yeah, Alpine on older Thinkpads rules. What DE / WM are you using ?

Oh that’s an actually insightful answer! Thank you!

I don’t really have any issue with KDE, I’ve actually barely used it at all, I was merely trolling. It’s juste the “a lot of functionality at the expense of simplicity “ that doesn’t speaks to me in general. I understand the criticism against GNOME, however I got to really appreciate the effort they are putting in simplicity and integration. Once you get used to do things “the gnome way” , it’s really comfortable imo. I guess the same goes for any DE or WM.

I use Aeon btw, so of course I’m all in for using vanilla gnome!

GNOME is rock solid on my device, unlike KDE. What do you mean by that exactly?

The custom kernel situation looks kinda tricky indeed. What parts are not working without it?

Im considering an old surface go as well

I had similar unexpected behavior with a closed Telegram tab. Feels weird and a bit worrying that stuff is allowed to run in the background like that.

Alpine works great for the desktop and I’m using it myself for my lower end machine.

Working without glibc and with some strangly named packages is sometimes tricky, but so far I have been able to do anything I’d wanted!

If it can help you in your journey, here is my personal configuration for Alpine, with WMs and DEs on their own branches. Only the ‘suckless’ (DWM) and ‘xfce’ are working properly so far: https://gitlab.com/sunoc/als/-/tree/suckless?ref_type=heads

Aeon Desktops it is