1. There is no shame in dual booting. That will give you the freedom to find alternatives for everything in your workflow until you stop needing to boot into Windows at all. The preferred way is with a separate physical drive, because windows updates will sometimes overwrite the ESP partition or do other weird things which could break your Linux install.

2. Not an expert in that, sorry. There are plenty of articles online for alternatives for all of those.

3. Linux has no trouble reading NTFS. I have an NTFS network drive, and on my dual boot laptop I can simply reach into the NTFS partition on my second drive and grab files from it from Linux (Windows cannot read the Linux drive, though).

4. Not sure on those specific models, but I have a Behringer UM2 and Linux detects and works with it just fine.

Sounds reasonable.

The Samsung 870 EVO should be comparable, if not even slightly better than the MX500 (1GB DRAM cache for the 870 vs 512MB for the MX500, and rated for 600TBW instead of 360TBW for the MX500). Samsung had a spate of failures with their 990 NVMe drives a while back, but aside from that they have a good reputation for reliability overall. I used one of the prior-generation 860 EVO drives in a laptop of mine for years and never had an issue.

Team Group is a decent budget brand in my book. Taiwanese-based memory seller who make both SSDs and RAM, even micro SD cards and flash drives. They have an actual product portfolio instead of just one or two models like the no-name drives. I have used their 4TB MP34 pcie gen 3 drives before with good success (now discontinued, but at one time they were one of the cheapest DRAM-cache NVMe drives available), and I have one of their MP44 gen 4 HMB drives in my current laptop.

The Samsung QVO drives are based on QLC NAND flash (Quad-Level Cell). It has lower write endurance than TLC (Triple-Level Cell) and they slow down to nearly hard drive speeds when close to full. Supposedly, the technology is lower cost, but when manufacturers charge effectively the same price or more for QLC as TLC drives, there is zero benefit for a consumer to buy them and they should probably be avoided.

I am not aware of any SATA SSDs which use HMB, so I am not sure if it would work correctly through an adapter. I think the choice for 2.5" SSDs is generally between DRAM cache SSDs and ones with SLC caching, which are typically much cheaper. I think both are pretty much able to saturate the ~500MB/s bandwidth of a SATA III connection, but may run into issues with prolonged writes or when getting very close to full.

Looking on Newegg, for DRAM cache units, things like the Samsung 870 evo and Crucial MX500 cost ~$90 or so for the 1TB model.

SLC cache units like the Crucial BX500 or Team Group CX2 are much less, more like $50-60 USD. The Team Group one claims 800TBW endurance for the 1TB model. I do not know if I believe that, but generally speaking I have used their nvme drives before and have not had any fail on me, for what that small data point is worth.

Do you know the specs of this laptop off hand? 2007 would place it in sort of a grey area between 32 bit and 64 bit CPUs. If it is 32-bit, you are likely going to have major issues and I would recommend using something else.

Even if it is a 64-bit CPU, the performance may not be amazing, and running modern browsers with anything less than, say, 4GB RAM could be an issue.

I would recommend something lightweight, such as Linux Mint with the XFCE Desktop Environment. You may need to get even more aggressive about finding something lightweight for something that old, though.

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

I’ve literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.

AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.

I don’t think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.

I can’t really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.

XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I’m sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.

I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.

How so? I have never found installing yay difficult, and using it is essentially the same as pacman with the addition of aur packages. What issues have you run into?

ClamAV

But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.

Linux Mint. Easy to set up, reasonably easy to use, and used by enough people that a quick internet search should probably turn up results of people who have run into similar issues if you ever have a problem.

I second @Hellmo_Luciferrari@lemm.ee 's suggestion of Arch/KDE. I cannot think of a time when I have had to go outside of pacman/yay or setup a custom repo. I don’t use them personally, but the AUR even has -git versions of many packages if I needed to have the absolutely down-to-the-minute latest version of something, but even the official repos are rarely far behind in my experience. Fractional scaling seems to work fine on my 2560x1600 display. VScodium works fine when I tested it, but I do not use it regularly enough to really have a strong opinion on it.

That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.

What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?

I second the recommendations for Mint. It should work out of the box. You can download the .iso file from their website and use a program called Rufus to write it to a USB stick. You should be able to plug it in, shut down windows, boot from the USB (may have to go into the boot menu in the UEFI), and it will install linux for you. This will be the same process for most linux distributions.

For installing software on Linux, there is an important difference between Windows and Linux; on windows you typically download an installer .exe and use that to install a program. On Linux, each distro has its own “package manager” which functions a lot like an app store on a phone. The package manager will install the program for you and take care of keeping everything updated for you, so if your GPU drivers, steam, or whatever else needs updating, just run an update on the package manager and it will do everything for you. Some will support automatic updates, so you may need to google how to turn that on for any given distribution’s package manager.

In terms of what hardware works better, most folks will tell you to use AMD graphics cards over Nvidia, but that is about it. Nvidia still has proprietary drivers which don’t always play nice with linux, but as an nvidia user myself, the problems seem to be getting fewer and fewer.

I think an 11" laptop would probably be a better bet. Taking a quick look on Ebay, I am seeing things like Dell 3190s, 3180s and Lenovo Yoga 11e laptops for around $50 or so. I see some chromebooks with x86 processors for as little as $35, but I do not have much experience with installing Linux on chromebooks and so you may want to double-check how to do that before buying anything.

Is there some reason why it needs to be 10" specifically? 10" is a pretty uncommon size, and may needlessly limit your options to ancient netbooks from 15 years ago.

If something like a used 11-13" business laptop would be acceptable for your use case then there are a whole slew of options in the $50-70 range on ebay, maybe less if you find a good deal. I think there is also something to be said for getting something with a halfway reasonable keyboard which will not be agonizing to type on.

How so? I see plenty of posts by folks who recently switched from Windows, and I imagine the ones who are willing to take that leap in the first place lean towards the more tech-literate side.

“Willing to learn” is more subjective, perhaps, but I do not think my case is that uncommon.

I think that one’s experience with Manjaro is often heavily dependent on how many AUR packages one has installed. Were you using many AUR packages?

Manjaro was my first distro for a year and it was fine. The occasional AUR dependency blockage was irritating for me but did not break anything.

My first distro was an Arch fork and I moved to vanilla Arch a year later. My problems in that time have been minimal. Personally, I am glad that someone recommended that I use an arch-based distro as a beginner. Mind you, I came in as a modestly computer-literate Windows refugee willing to learn. I think for those types of people it can be appropriate to recommend Arch-based distros.

So, yes, if you are not willing to google a problem, read a wiki, or use the terminal once in a while, Arch or its forks are probably not for you. I would probably not recommend Arch as a distro for someone’s elderly grandparent or someone not comfortable with computers.

That said, I do not know that I agree with the assertion that Arch “breaks all the time,” or that I even understand what “Arch bullshit®” is referring to. This overblown stereotype that Arch is some kind of mythical distro only a step removed from Linux From Scratch has to stop. None of that has been my experience for the last 4 years. Actually, if anything, it is the forks that get dependency issues (looking at you, Manjaro) and vanilla Arch has been really solid for me.

1). It matters a little bit, but not a ton. A big difference will come down to what package manager comes with a distro, and whether it is a “rolling” distro that gets updates as soon as they come out, or one which withholds updates until after they have some time for bug testing, etc. Given that gaming is one of your primary use cases, I would recommend a rolling distro. If your distro does not come prepackaged with something you can usually install it. Minimalist distros like Arch come with almost nothing pre-installed, not even a desktop environment, so you can be very granular about what gets installed and keep you system lean.

2). Most distros will not have as much in the way of corporate control/privacy concerns. A few like Ubuntu or Fedora are more closely linked with a single company, but most are more community driven and this is not a concern.

3). The advice I always give to people first trying Linux is to go into it with the mindset that you are learning a new skill, as many things are simply done differently to Windows. Most things work fine, but every once in a while, especially when setting something up for the first time, it may require additional configuration steps. Very popular distros like Mint will usually have the most community resources, and you can often find posts or guides of people who have already solved some issue you run into. I would also throw one of the Arch-based distros onto your list: Endeavour OS, which is essentially a pre-configured Arch installation. The Arch wiki is one of the most highly regarded resources in the entire linux community, and even if you are not using an Arch distro, many of the guides on it can be helpful.

4). Generally speaking, my multi-monitor usage with KDE has been seamless. No issues that I can think of. HDR support has only very recently been added, so I am not sure how well it works, but it is improving rapidly.

5). I think Plasma would be a good fit for what you are trying to do. Honestly, it is very customizable, but perfectly usable right out of the box even if you do not want to do anything to it. The layout is very familiar for a Windows user.