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A fellow sysadmin furry I see

Linux mint is a good, “click first” distro that won’t break without root + will be easy for her to use. For something with a more modern desktop and more recent updates, Bazzite is really good at just working and (in my experience) has never broken

Xfce next major release will have Wayland support so no need to even change!

Debian can be pretty light/small on a clean install and xfce should run fine on 2gb. Although the biggest thing is gonna be if the laptop has fast storage or not. Since its a celeron it might not be upgradeable, and if it doesnt already have an SSD any desktop will feel slow

Personally if I really wanted to squeeze all the performance I could for web browsing I’d go with minimal Debian and RiverWM but thats a bit more involved

In a similar vein I really miss rainmeter, now I’ve gone down the deep rabbit hole of EWW and AGS but rainmeter was way easier

Have you taken a look at the pinetab? Its probably the most Dev oriented Linux tablet. Librem-11 might be the only Linux native x86 tabket but if you don’t mind flashing a new OS a refurbished/used microsoft surface would be cheap and powerful. (Need the linux-surface kernal for all functionality)

Personally I would say start with Arch and if you like it use endeavorOS. Endeavor is just easy install for arch(and the only one I’ve tried that actually achieved it well) so if you already know the inner workings it saves a lot of tedious install work and has some nice QOL defaults already set like yay colorized

Can’t go wrong with just booting the live environment and seeing if it works. Just check your display is the right resolution and your speakers and brightness work before installing. I also recommend checking it’s actually running off of the 1050ti too

Also t480 - i5-8350u CPU.

My process was to update firmware with fwupd -> change TLP to performance(depending on desktop environment you may have a battery life settings panel) -> reboot into bios and change power settings to performance.

Ran a benchmark and my CPU was running at full power when it was limiting itself to 2Ghz before.

Did you change your bios settings to performance? I had the same problem but changing both bios and power management to performance finnaly let my CPU boost to advertised speeds

Lenovo has official support for Ubuntu on all laptops which translates very well to other distros. IMO the Thinkbook gen 6 having fully upgradable ram and decent specs is a really good deal for a Linux laptop *when on sale

Ubuntu maintains it’s own package library which is far newer then Debians but less tested/stable. Debian only releases new version when it’s team feels their ready. However Debian does keep up to date with security patches

If you would like a distro that keeps itself up to date try out Fedora, it’s updated every 6 months and has been super popular lately

Note that if you use flatpacks they will be up to date no matter what distro you choose, making Debian a very stable option while still getting new features in applications

Edit: edited to answer the question more clearly

Thought I settled down with EndeavourOS… then I got into ricing and the urge to move to void or alpine is strong

Now you’ve got the idea of making a game around filling out open street map info. I’ll add it too the list of “cool programs I don’t have nearly enough time to make” 😔

T480($145) + dual heat pipes upgrade($30) and it’s amazing. I never hear the fan unless I’m compiling something! Hoping one day a mx150 motherboard will be $150ish so I can play my favorite older games in bed