I chose Debian 12 as a solid and stable base. Which of these shipped DEs is the best for this particular laptop series and Windows 10 like user experience?
GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.18
Don’t know the exact laptop model and year, but here are some specs: IdeaPad, only HDD, DVD drive, shipped with Win 8 or 10 (I think), unbearably slow on Win 10 currently
Use case: office, web, movies (not streaming), things for non-tech-savvy users
Personally, I’m using Arch btw with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, so I would prefer this over other DEs, but Debian still ships version 5. Has anyone experience with performance on an old Lenovo laptop with any of the listed environments?
I suggest not giving their user sudo rights and having your own user with sudo rights for installing apps, doing upgrades and so on.
Yes but upgrades should be automatic and not require any privilege escalation. There is nothing privileged about keeping your system up to date. Same for flatpaks.
With a --user repo (in the flathub install command) you can let them install and uninstall their apps without any privileges, only to their user. Otherwise with a system repo they need to be in the flatpak group.
It will be very useful to have SSH installed if you need to assist them remotely.
That didnt age well ;D
and yes complex stuff like Tailscale is needed as the only good VNC apps for Wayland dont have builtin servers for connecting without an IP (like RealVNC, TeamViewer or RustDesk have).
Using NoIP could be an easy solution too though.
Syncthing has versioning, I wouldnt even put servers in the game. Just backup their home to one of your machines (if that is okay for them).
