Timberborn is awesome. I play on the stable release (non-experimental branch) through Proton experimental and it runs about as well as it did under Windows. I’m running Bazzite (Fedora) though so my system is much more up to date than Debian, but I bet one of the awesome nerds here could help you get it running on Debian.

Proton DB page for the people smarter than I am, lol

Maybe check your local Craigslist or e-waste recycler? Someone on Craigslist near-ish me has a 10" Dell Inspiron laptop for $25. There’s also a HP mini 110 that the seller is asking way too much for, lol.

That size of laptop/netbook has kind of fallen out of fashion and it seems to be touchscreen tablet-likes in that size now. You’ll want to keep build quality in mind with the older machines because a lot of stuff is soldered together at that size and age, I had a HP Stream 11 and the hardware recently failed - it was e-waste when I bought it but it ran Linux well until it died.

Thinkpad made 10" models?

… I found the Thinkpad 10, which is a tablet computer and a bit ridiculous for OPs intentions (or mine, for that matter, I’m looking for me too, lol).

Edit: the comment I’m replying to didn’t mention size when I replied.

Bazzite has been great for me. Bluetooth, Nvidia GPU, controllers, Bluetooth controllers all worked out of the box, and it’s based on Fedora so you get all of those perks, and the rollback feature, which comes by default, works (to an end user) rather like timeshift (I think - it lets you return to the previous working configuration if an update has a problem, which admittedly did happen to me recently, I just rolled back and waited for the devs to fix the problem the next day, lol).

It doesn’t have a live boot option so it just has to be installed to try it, which is disappointing.

But I totally get if OP wants to take a break and maybe come back to Linux in a few years, because Linux will keep getting better and Windows will keep getting worse.

OP seems to be running 8gig of ram, if that laptop is stock. I have actually run Bazzite Gnome on worse hardware (2 gigs of ram), but that was for the lulz, not because it was a good idea. Silverblue is Gnome DE, and OP seems to want a much lighter weight DE than either gnome or KDE.

IME, Debian is fairly minimal tinkering once you get the proprietary drivers worked out. Although I don’t know how Ubuntu handles updates, is it as (usually) hands off like the immutable/atomic distros?

Has someone tried to do an atomic/immutable distro with one of the lightweight DEs? Seems like there’s a niche there, although Mint might be similar enough from an end user experience standpoint that it’s not really worth the effort.

Update: Good (?) news - I just ran into a comment on the Discourse group linking to this post because they’re having the same issue, and several more people posted on the Bazzite Discord.

I didn’t break it!

Thanks for your help. I was planning on waiting a few days because I’ll have more free time on Monday, I’ll try updating again on Monday.

I’m on stable.

The developers are active on Discord and I’ll make a post there Monday when I have more time to tinker with it and reply to people, and until then I’ll enjoy the perks of an atomic distro, lol. Thanks for your help and the thorough explanation!

You’re right, it’s 1. I went ahead and pinned it. I ran rpm-ostree update and it’s still not working, I’ll keep using the working deployment for the weekend and I’ll have more time to troubleshoot Monday and Tuesday.

At least I understand what the kernel panic message means thanks to the people here.

Ostree: 0 caused the kernel panic, but in grub I selected ostree: 1 (I rolled back to a previous update) and was able to get to the desktop like expected. Boot is the wrong term, sorry.

On Bazzite, and I use Heroic. It’s great for GOG and Epic store games.

Sure, but I wouldn’t expect an elderly user to be one of the people with the natural ability to nuke their OS.

I’ve daily driven Bazzite, an immutable distro, since July, and I haven’t seen the kind of Flatpak issues they talk about - or frankly any major issues, this whole experience has been way easier than Windows ever was with updates (it took me a few minutes to figure out Proton and Heroic launcher though). I didn’t know about the new Fedora update until I booted up and my lock screen was different. My experience is that Bazzite (and likely all of the other uBlue Fedoras) is fantastic and absolutely ready now.

That said, nothing is more stable than something like Debian. Unless you’ve got some hardcore gamer grandma I think the immutable distros are a solution to a problem not present in OPs hypothetical.

Bazzite is fantastic and it’s what I’m running on my gaming laptop, but I’ve always wondered why you would want to put it on a Steam Deck? Is it for the people who use it as a laptop replacement?

And good news, Nvidia seems to have more or less fixed the second one a few months ago.

You could just do a live install on a USB, and you don’t even have to install to your machine to try it out. Debian has live installs available for both KDE and Gnome and should be perfectly fine for just checking out the DE (and most distros have a live option, check to see if your preferred distro does), just know that it will be slow and you won’t see that in a proper installation.

Edit: just saw further down thread, Mint can do a live USB but you’ll probably just want Cinnamon with that. Bazzite does not have a live boot, and from my cursory glance at possibly running both DEs it seemed to be a bit more of a headache on Bazzite than other distros. Trying Gnome on a Debian live install will at least tell you if you like Gnome.

Bunsenlabs Linux (a successor to Crunchbang) still has it by default and their forums have some current conversations about it, maybe check there?

We really need a Linux circlejerk community for this type of thing.

I know KDE has a page looking for contributors, including translators, I don’t know how much they need more Italian translators though.

https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

Try KDE Connect if you’ve got an android phone, it’s pretty cool. I had to tweak the notification settings on my phone to get it to work the way I wanted, but ymmv, I’m just saying this because I’m usually happy with the KDE default settings (at least the Bazzite KDE default, I’m not sure how much the Bazzite team has changed their DEs).

Should I be worried? I was distro hopping for a bit and put together a Ventoy drive to make that easier, and I used it to boot the install iso for the distro I ultimately decided on for my gaming laptop. It seemed highly recommended and I didn’t know about the Ventoy bros at that point.