Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.

Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet

It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.

Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.

All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don’t really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.

If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.

RX 480, thinking of upgrading since ROCm support for it ended a while ago and working around it has become very painful

Reinstalling GRUB in chroot so it ‘registers’ with the BIOS when cloning an install of Linux

Same, too many clocks, all getting out of sync, and some on power strips that get turned off periodically.

I was thinking something on those lines the other day. We like to say that Linux revives old computers, and I wouldn’t for a second consider putting Windows back on them, but I also have a case of hardware support so close, yet so far. I’ve two old laptops with nvidia chips from before the days of Optimus switiching, so you are forced to use the dGPU. Believe me, I wasted a whole weekend trying to make them use only integrated graphics. It was fine while they were supported under the proprietary nvidia driver, but as soon as support ended, nouveau became the only option and it absolutely crippled 3D performance, even on very old titles. Meanwhile, Windows still supports the old 340 driver needed for those graphics chips.

Mostly comes down to hardware vendors not bothering with Linux support and open-source in general. Which leaves support for affected devices down to volunteers having time to reverse-engineer a driver from scratch. To be clear, I don’t blame nouveau at all. It must have been a ton of work to even get the nouveau driver to its current state.

Back in the early 2010s, I bought a new PC with Windows 8 on it. Hated the way it looked and the way it worked. I wanted my Start menu and Aero and Classic themes back. Led me to learning about Linux. But uxTheme and Classic Shell kept me happy for a couple more years.

Then I got a laptop with Windows 10. Felt my heart rate spike as I went through the settings and found out how much more hostile to user choice and privacy Microsoft had become. When the semi-annual updates kept undoing all my hard work debloating Windows, I decided it was time to begin using Linux in earnest.

At first, I had a dual-boot setup and jumped around between Ubuntu, Deepin, Arch, etc. Found myself booting into the Windows partition less than once a month, at which point I moved it out onto its own drive. Distro-hopping went on for about a year, after which I decided that Debian met all of my needs. Continued DE-hopping for about another year until settling on XFCE with Chicago95. Brought me enough joy to make a standardized setup in a VM, which I have since cloned to all of my computers except for the Windows laptop I keep around for work.

Mixed bag. I’m lucky enough that most of my work can be done on a Linux machine. Workplace does require us to bring our own devices, but the policy is extremely lax, no need to install any monitoring software or the like. Which lets me have a Linux desktop chilling on my desk.

But I do have to keep a laptop with Windows around. We sometimes have to work with overcomplicated Office documents that break on alternatives like LibreOffice or the occasional piece of proprietary software that needs direct USB access, which Wine cannot yet provide.

Check out zint

• Bulk unarchiver or a frontend for ffmpeg (using existing tools, both get very messy when special characters or multiple directories are involved)
  • Existing ffmpeg GUIs have had fixed lists of formats and options, making new or obscure ones inaccessible. There also needs to be an option to export the command based on GUI selections so the user can learn if they choose, or fix the command if something isn’t right.
• Adding the little details of Windows File Manager (i.e. Format dialog, search by attribute like MP3 bitrate) to some existing Linux file manager
• Mounting of network drives in Linux graphical file managers: many of them handle it through gvfs, which for some reason insists on mountpoints with long directory paths and special characters, breaking compatibility with various utilities
• Extending Linux Mint’s libadapta to further restore theming in libadwaita apps. This I am personally looking forward to contribute to as more programs move to libadwaita and disrupt the look I’ve painstakingly set up for my desktop.

~/.drafts, in which my text editor taskbar shortcut script creates files YYMMDD_text_N. I passionately believe in eliminating the chore of manually naming my spur-of-the-moment notes and text files.

~/progs or ~/bin where loose programs not provided by my package manager reside.

If there’s a secondary drive, /media/disk1 as the mount point in fstab.

Seems fine if it only pops up with cursor activity or hovering. Agree if it’s permanently there though. When I use mpv, I have to configure it with some semblance of GUI controls or I’ll lose my mind.

As for specific UI needs, I have went at length to seamlessly theme my desktop like NT 4.0. I could use a fully libadwaita-themed system if I had to, but it just doesn’t spark the same joy that makes working on my computer just a bit more enjoyable.

Can also endorse aptitude, but hopefully OP already has it installed prior to this issue. May have to manually install using dpkg if not. Whenever I run into issues like this, aptitude solves it 95% of the time, makes regular apt look like a baby helplessly crying.

Minimal delay between a program releasing new features or bugfixes and you getting to use them. Even as an avid Debian user, sometimes I get bummed out when they freeze a package for release right before a feature I would have really liked makes it in.

As for security, there’s not a huge difference I’m aware of. On Debian, features stay where they are, but maintainers will backport just the security fixes of each package to the current stable release.

Saw the followup post, glad to hear its all running well. I created my VM using virt-manager with a raw disk image and UEFI firmware rather than the default qcow2 format with BIOS. I keep the image size down to 32 GB to save time when imaging. Install proceeds as usual, make sure fstab mounts disks by UUID, Debian does by default in my case. When everything is configured, dd the raw disk image over to the target disk, do the rituals to make it bootable, and consider configuring new partition UUIDs.

Linux: no, but not necessarily plug-and-play. My daily-driver install is literally pre-configured on a VM and cloned to all of my machines with various motherboards. Nvidia complications aside, a default Linux install will contain nearly every driver you could ever need to get up and running. However, some motherboards do need you to chroot from a live environment and make it “aware” of the existing GRUB bootloader.

Windows: At best, you’ll need to reactivate. More often, it’ll be missing a driver or just not work as well as it did on the old motherboard. It’s better to reinstall Windows.

Will admit that I’m very biased against reinstalling Linux anew except as a last resort since it’s a painstaking days-long process to configure things just right for my picky tastes.

If you have SMR drives, it is normal for them to rearrange their contents during periods of user inactivity. The way Shingled Magnetic Recording crams more bytes into the same platter necessitates its own kind of “defragmenting”. Unless it’s host-managed SMR, it’s done by the drive’s onboard controller, so the OS won’t be aware.