the distros you tried were… adventurous, to say the least, none of those would even occur to me. the my rule of thumb is:

1. fedora - for the newest hardware, you qualify big time, especially if RH was an initial choice for you
2. ubuntu - middle of the road, best for the majority of users, excluding newest or really old hardware
3. mint/debian - for older hardware

everything else is for hobbyists and/or special use cases, not for people expecting to do actual work.

I’m gonna disagree on both counts.

I run fedora on my desktop and a bunch of laptops and have done so for years; I would never recommend it to a beginner, or even do the install and all the laborious post-install steps and then hand it over.

Plasma is closer to a standard desktop paradigm, but it has its stupid choices that aren’t welcome on a laptop - FOUR finger gestures, really? why?! also, it’s way too configurable so it’s super-easy to fuck up something without an easy way to reset it.

so, both the options you mentioned are natural progressions for an intermediate user, someone who started with an easy option like Ubuntu + Gnome, and then progressed because they don’t need the kiddie wheels no more; but not as first distro.

everybody recommending mint skipped over the fact that this is a convertible, i.e. has touch. mint/cinnamon/mate isn’t terribly optimized in that regard and is rocking X11, a headache a beginner doesn’t need nowadays. mint is a phenomenal choice for older laptops, but not this one.

with a heavy heart, I’m recommending Ubuntu. it runs Gnome, which is a way more modern DE, runs on Wayland so has solid gestures and touch support, and lastly, it is very beginner friendly. you’ll be able to sort out any potential issue as that’s the most widely used distro and has solutions and tutorials for practically everything.

once you’ve crossed over and gain some experience, you’ll inevitably start banging your head on the ceiling (snaps and such). by then you’ll have enough experience and knowledge to move to something better.

check out dell latitude 5285/5290 2-in-1. they are Surface Pro lookalikes with detachable keyboards, but with way service-friendlier interior - easy to open and SSD, comms, battery can be easily replaced, whereas RAM is soldered. the screens (12" 1920x1200 IPS mutlitouch) are gorgeous and the hardware isn’t too shabby, kabylake (7xxxu) and kabylake-r (8xxxu), with standard UEFI BIOS so you can install Linux and have SecureBoot even. I can get them locally for $100-150, dependent on config and equipment (even less if they’re without battery and keyboard).

edit: yeah, I misunderstood your idea, I thought you wanted a cheap linux tablet. what you actually want is a fantasy - an ultra-portable device with huge battery autonomy running linux and such a thing doesn’t exist, for any kind of money.

namely, the mentioned dells are twice the heft of a normal android tablet and the battery autonomy is laughable; not only is it not an improvement over a normal laptop, it’s likely to be worse, as that thing’s essentially a laptop with extras, like touch, gyros, etc.

then comes the real hammer - touching the thing. Gnome and Plasma (and their derivatives) have touch support but if you’re coming from an android or iOS tablet, that support is in its infancy. it’s crude, inconsistent, flaky, and not very well propagated throughout the system. it’s way better than it was a few years ago, but this is not something you’ll want to hang your career or education on.

you can tweak the thing into something semi-usable, and for the price (around $100) that’s a worthwhile endeavour and cute hobby project. it bears repeating, it is not daily driver material, and that includes way pricier solutions - saw a Ryzen 6-series the other day for like $700; everything I’ve written applies to it as well.

this right here. remove partition and apply and then start the installer. there is a way to map this partition in the installer, but that’s such a horrific UX mess that it’s a challenge even for experienced folks.

you can still run both tools, I do so on my main workstation. they stay in the status bar and don’t bother you none. when you’re done working and recline on your sofa, you can send e.g. youtube videos to the rig and they play fullscreen by way of mpv.

I’ve gone the other way - there is no interacting per se with the media PC; instead, it’s a dumb sink that plays back everything you send it, by way of macast and jellyfin-mpv-shim. you use android apps to send it stuff (e.g. newpipe share to allshare which connects to macast and jellyfin android app which connects to JMS) and to control playback (pause, skip, change subs, etc.). so, all media selection and playback control is done from the mobile device, no need to touch the media PC doing the playback.

not sure this will fit into your use case because of spotty internet, but that should prompt you to install jellyfin post-haste. then you have two options, the mentioned android app + JMS or just the jellyfin media player which can run in TV mode with a pared down controller (up/down/left/right/enter/back) - I’ve successfully repurposed an ancient Apple Remote that has just those six keys.

not to trample on your experiences, but you can make it work. it’s true it’s super cumbersome and involved though.

I’ve had/got it working on a T420s, T480s, T14, MBPr 2012, on debian, fedora, and arch. it helps if it’s not your primary/only workstation so you can tweak it without pressure. keep at it, it’s worth it, I can’t imagine using my laptops any other way.

maybe do I write-up one of these days.

you should enable suspend-then-hibernate instead. laptop suspends normally and if not woken in, say, an hour, the RTC hibernates it to disk.

I mean, OK, it’s a vulnerability and there are interesting implications, but this is hardly significant in any pracitcal sense of the word.

the potential victim has to run their system without a firewall, has to print to the printer they’ve never interacted with before and then the attacker can run shit with whatever the printing system’s user id is, which shouldn’t be an issue on any reasonably modern distro.

I routinely remove cups and friends from any system I run because I have no need for printing and it bothers me to see it constantly during every system upgrade.

https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm

I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.

anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.

if they run hardware that’s not cutting edge, by all means, that’s the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that’s on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what’s what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I’d caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it’s still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that’s most likely to “just work” for most people. it’ll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they’ve crossed over, they’re more likely to wander further.

a combination; some have swap as a btrfs subvolume, some as a swapfile in root and those are encrypted, when the system boots it requests the encryption passphrase, regardless if it coldboots or restores. restores from swap are way faster than coldboot plus all your stuff is how you left it.

on some systems I have a separate swap partition outside of luks2/btrfs and that one’s unencrypted. when it restores from there, it doesn’t request the passphrase and the boot is even faster. that’s obviously less secure but my threat model is a lost/stolen laptop, I seriously doubt someone’s gonna forensic the shit out of my swap, it’s more likeky it’s gonna get wiped and sold.

to fully utilise this tech, it’s essential to set up suspend-then-hibernate, another awesome feature that’s way too cumbersome to set up. the laptop suspends for like 60 minutes and if it’s not woken up, it hibernates to disk.

I’ve made it work on arch, debian and fedora, on a T420s, T480s, T14 AMD, MBPr 2012, each on luks2 + btrfs with systemd-boot, and it works flawlessly on all of them. the setup is super-involved and cumbersome though but it’s easily accomplished once you get the hang of it.

the links posted here along with the arch wiki is what I used. it helps if it’s not your primary and only device, so you have time to retry until you get it right.

I don’t think any Thinkpads have AMI firmware, which is the source of this fuckup.

that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.

for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.

the whole apple-bad thing aside, you’re getting a non-expandable 8 GB laptop, of which a significant portion goes to graphics. that’s pretty low today, and it’s gonna be worse down the road. speaking of graphics, although Asahi has basic functionality, the driver isn’t 100% yet.

I hope you don’t plan on torrenting a buncha stuff, as the SSD is small and non-replaceable and after years of use has an insane TBW number.

the battery longevity is a solid argument but you are buying a 4 year old battery that will show signs of aging.

I am all for repurpose/reuse/recycle, but unless you get it for free, or close to it, this thing s a bad idea. get a similarly aged business-class laptop (thinkpad, yoga, latitude, elitebook, etc.) that you can cram full of RAM and storage and replace practically every component if it fails.

CZ and dd and other “it’s 1998” tools copy the entire disk. like, you clone a 500 GB SSD with 50 GB used to another disk, guess how much data gets copied? correctomundo, the entire 500 gigs. that’s not super-healthy for the new drive and it recreates the same volume UUIDs on the target disk as the source drive, so you’re left with a mess if you keep both drives in a system.

you have a modern tool at your disposal, the mentioned btrfs send subvol | btrfs receive subvol that copies only what’s used. GRUB (you can use this opportunity to switch to systemd-boot) won’t pick up shit, you need to install it to the new drive (and remove it from the old one).

eons ago, macOS had the SuperDuper! tool, a free utility that clones the entire disk, resizing the partition in the process and copies only the data and it does that from within the OS, no booting off USB installers and such. sad to say, nothing close exists over here, you’ll just have to get good at doing things manually.

look up btrfs send and receive. you’ll be copying data from the old disk to the new. prior to that you create the same layout on the new disk (efi, boot, btrfs with LUKS, subvolumes root and home). sadly, there aren’t any readymade solutions that do this for you. big time NO on clonezilla and friends.