ubuntu. you’re a beginner, you want things to just work and you need a touch-centric environment with good UI scaling OOB - mint is X11 and has neither of them things.

then once you figure stuff out, moving to e.g. fedora with stock GNOME and no snap crap will be a breeze. good luck.

combine efi and boot into a single partition and switch to systemd-boot

it also has the OPDS plugin, so compatible Android readers can get books directly off it

I have the same experience. mounting the vault (sshfs) to showing contents is like 5 minutes. client ryzen 5600, no significant CPU activity.

it bothers me immensely that javascript backed Gnome that I can’t make run fluidly and jerklessly on competent desktop hardware is the default on underpowered mobile hardware, making Android and iOS level fluidity practically unattainable in the foreseeable future.

edit: I run pmOS on a SDM845 with 8 GB RAM and fast storage, tried em all on edge (gnome, plasma, phosh, plasma mobile) and it’s a 5 fps stuttering mess. that’s before I load something to said RAM, like a browser or (dog forbid) an electron app.

off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that’s not a hindrance for your use case and it’ll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

if you’re adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.

it’s using mpv under the hood, so I guess it should be able to play audio headless. I’m using allcast to cast to it and control it.

I’m using macast as a media renderer, for video and audio. don’t know if there’s a docker container for it.

ubuntu because everything works.

in case you can’t stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you’re set.

two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won’t come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won’t wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I’ll dig up the the script.

stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.

because they used to be special. “I run linux”, matrix text on boot, typing shit in the terminal, “I’m in”, awe-inspiring shit to an onlooker…

but nowadays, anyone can run ubuntu or mint or whatevs and our hero ain’t special no more. so here comes the ultimate delimiter.

my annoyance with his output aside, can we make it so that you can’t use “beautiful” on your own shit? others can say your stuff is, you can’t go “I created a beautiful xy”.

looks easy enough, will try, thank you.

tbh, looked at the thing some while back and noped out when I saw “java” in there; absolutely irrational, I know - just can’t stand the thing. cool that there’s an alternative.

so there are still sales.

don’t know about that latitude, but for the thinkpad you’d do well to disable the nvidia graphics in BIOS setup. intel graphics is adequate for daily stuff and you can actually use the thing as a mobile device i.e. on battery,

mint uses X11 which should be considered legacy at this point. wayland (Gnome, Plasma) has all the touch and dock/undock and rotate and pen etc goodies. try it out from a liveUSB and decide for yourself.

this one, OP. no need to introduce the horror that’s a:

• hosted app (why?!)
• client app is electron crapware
• the client app doesn’t even have full functionality, you have to use the web UI for some tasks

edit: I’m obviously speaking about the bitwarden/vaultwarden horror. keepassXC is none of them things.

I used enpass for years and was a happy user. one day it prompted me for some re-authentication bullshit security theater. although in that instant it was an easy task, took me all of 10 seconds, it demonstrated a scary amount of power they had as I couldn’t bypass it and access my data. from that point on, its days were numbered.

the second issue is the export functionality that was seriously lacking and I had to resort to 3rd party converter tools to convert it to keepassXC; no way that flew by their QC, it had to be intentional.

you’re running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.

what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn’t being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it’s not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.

wayland isn’t new, it’s default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the rd.live.ram switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn’t touch your SSD.

piracy didn’t start with the internet and won’t end on it. like with porn, it always finds a way.

good start, but in the next iteration (as you’re the dabbler) try to replace tailscale with wireguard. the majority of that stack is not needed for your scenario, and you’ll also not dick around with authentication and such.