The last few days I've been focused on putting a Linux distribution on a dog-slow Windows 10 laptop I'm responsible for. (8GB RAM was not enough, it seemed to be constantly swapping to its agonizingly slow magnetic disk drive...)

First, I put Fedora SilverBlue 37 on it, in hopes the immutability would pay off in providing a hard-to-destroy environment for some less tech savvy users. But getting the Broadcom drivers to work required some finagling, which made me think upgrades (every 6 months in Fedora-land) would get messy.

I want to set this thing up and forget about it with the expectation that non-expert users can keep it updated indefinitely. SilverBlue probably isn't it, but it was fun to try, and it did demonstrate that a GNOME 3 desktop runs much better on the HP than Windows 10 did.

So I've found myself back in the world of Debian, Ubuntu, and friends. Linux Mint is the current favorite: Windows-esque, with an LTS support horizon that extends out to 2027, two years after Windows 10's. By 2027, the machine will be someone else's problem. It's not booting as quickly as I expected so... might need to work on that. But otherwise, it seems promising.