MadModder

Presently using EasyOS, Barry Kauler's latest, based on Devuan Excalibur. Very happy with it.

If you want to try it, Barry has a simple installer called EasyDD which will write an image file of EasyOS to a USB thumbdrive. That will be a fully operational live build, not requiring installation to HD. Runs fine that way.

Of course a quality thumbdrive will start up noticeably faster and better than a bargain basement one. Actually, during the initial write installation it will tell you just how fast your usb drive is, comparatively.

EasyOS has containers so you can run stuff in sandboxes if you want. And it encrypts your data files and any customizations or applications you add. It does come with a large number of apps already, but is only about 1 gig in size. It runs in RAM so is very fast. It has an easy upgrade button, and also takes snapshots of your system, if desired so you can return to an earlier state.

Frankly, the best Linux OS I've tried re. small size and efficiency for a DIY type. I like it anyway.

Linux and NVIDIA have a strange relationship. I'm not sure why but there always seems to be issues with NVIDIA chip-sets and Linux installs .  The popular distros like Ubuntu seem to handle it a bit better than the others

I'm currently using kubuntu with an  AMD saffire GPU that at least works with most things . My previous NVIDIA card have some strange behavior with Wayland .

I have win11 on another drive and hate having to use it . Microsoft have really F'ed it up and I cant see it recovering - kids these days don't seem to be able to write solid working software and concentrate on wizz-bang  animation rather than operability .  And don't get me started about phones.......

The last time I tried the undo button thing She slapped me!

I've been using Pop Os for a few months, and quite like it as a step to see how things work in Linux world. 

I've also looked for a lighter distro for my 2011 laptop to replace Win7. Yes, there are plenty of them, but still, they tend to include way too much stuff, that I'll never use.

Make a custom Linux iso then? Meh, I tried that using Cubic, but don't know how much can be removed until something breaks. Dependencies I guess.

How about even lighter distro, where it's possible to install only needed apps?

Lately I've been testing server versions of Ubuntu and Debian in VM. In other words, 'headless' ones that doesn't have elements like desktop (or actually anything that uses GUI) as a default.

Anyway, there are tech guys on Youtube, who show the steps how to make a minimal Linux installation with desktop using server distro.

What comes to desktop environments, I've tried Xfce, Lxqt, and Mate.

At this point, Mate seems to be the closest to what I'm looking for, for its lightness and customization options. It even allows using window borders in its themes without the need to mess with css files. An example of classic Window-ish GUI:

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Ubuntu Mate uses Snap (which is a service running at background) to install and handle apps like Firefox. Like with Windows, I don't like such unnecessary services hanging around, and Snapd is one of them. Obviously, disabling that breaks some things.   

Debian Mate doesn't seem to use Snap out of the box, so I'll stick to it for now. 

So, this is about finding out how usable, reliable and perhaps snappy such a minimal system can be, when compared to 'full' distros like Mint and Pop Os.

In the end, bit of a rant:

Pop Os that I use on my pc, is quite resource heavy. When having something like Virtualbox and two web browsers running, it occasionally freezes the host system, VM or both.

I have 8Gb of ram on my pc, and don't remember having that kind of issues with Win7. From what I've read, it's about different memory management/allocation. There probably isn't much that can be done about it, except adding more RAM.

Some points about the subject at https://wartimeconsigliere.substack.com/p/why-windows-is-superior-at-memory?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

My browser (Seamonkey) has Edit>Undo right in the top bar. That's what I use. I guess the more modern browsers everybody loves hide everything from a user for a "clean" interface. I can also select text, right click, and delete from a dropdown menu of commands in my flavor of Linux.

Might be possible to alter the interface theme for whatever browser you are using to make it more amenable to user controls and tools. This site isn't the only one where being able to edit input easily is an advantage.

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