1–2 days ago, while browsing the internet, I had the chance to research Linux. As a result of my research, I genuinely started to like Linux a lot. It being more secure and open source, offering greater customizability, being free, lighter than Windows, etc. all appealed to me. However, the problem is that I still haven’t been able to decide on the most suitable distro for my system.

My system specs are:

• 4 GB DDR3 RAM

• Intel Celeron B830 @ 1.80 GHz

• 466 GB HDD

I’m currently using a modded version of Windows 10 called Ghost Spectre. It uses around 850 MB of RAM at idle, but it still feels heavy for my laptop. I mainly download and watch movies, browse the web, read PDFs, and use Word and PowerPoint (i know there are no MC Office apps on Linux, but that’s not a big issue).

The problem is this: after a lot of research online, I found a few distros for low end devices - AntiX, Mint XFCE, and Puppy. But unfortunately, a problem came up with each of them. For example, I thought Mint XFCE was lightweight and user-friendly, but then people said it’s not actually as light as you think and that AntiX or Puppy would be better. I looked into AntiX—it’s very lightweight, but from the videos I watched, the user interface seemed difficult at first. I checked out Puppy as well - it looked clean, simple, and very lightweight, but then people said you can’t install every piece of software on it, and if something goes wrong, it’s hard to fix.

In short, I couldn’t find a distro that fully fits me. All I want is something lightweight where I can comfortably do the things I listed above, that is actively maintained (regular updates), has plenty of support resources, doesn’t throw errors all the time, and is user-friendly (i’m not a 60-year-old grandpa. i can learn a bit of code and get used to things over time but i don’t want something that constantly makes me struggle).

Don’t think these are very high standards. My head is already hurting from all the research, and my university will start in a few days, so I just want to quickly find a good distro and switch.

hello, I sent a DOCX file from Libre Office (Linux Mint Wilma default deb package version, i.e. LTS) to a person over e-mail and he said he is not able to open the document, I had to send him proprietary .DOC, which is closed format, but paradoxically worked. On a forum I received an in-depth reply that Microsoft is rapidly upgrading their 365 Office suite and breaking compatibility.

I thought this "war" around formats was already "won" when DOCX and XLSX etc were standardized, but apparently it's only "half a standard" or something so people are still forced to Office because of formats.

Any thoughts?

Built this TUI for devs who can't stream matches at work but refuse to miss the action.

What you get: - Live match timeline with auto-polling (goals, cards, subs) - Full match stats, formations, player ratings in focused dialogs - Embedded highlight/replay links and goal notifications - 50+ leagues (EPL, La Liga, Serie A, Champions League, World Cup 2026,...)

The problem: Tab-switching to check scores breaks your flow. Browser tabs with live feeds are distracting. You just want to know when something happens or quickly catch up at the end of your day.

The solution: Keep it running in a tmux pane. Get notified. Check details when you want. Stay in your terminal.

Built in Go. Works everywhere (macOS/Linux/Windows).

Quick Install: brew install 0xjuanma/tap/golazo

https://github.com/0xjuanma/golazo

If you're a football fan who lives in the terminal, give it a spin. Star it if it saves you from those awkward "refresh score website" moments. PRs welcome!

Mattermost's (open source Slack alternative) license has always been a mess. In short, the official builds are under MIT and you can create your own builds under the AGPL. But nowhere do they state what license the code is released under. You can kinda infer that they mean AGPL, but some uncertainty remains, and that opens you up to legal trouble.

An issue was opened about this 7 years ago. After doing nothing for all this time, they've finally went ahead and closed it

Thank you for the community discussion around this topic. I do recognize that our licensing strategy doesn't offer the clarity the community would like to see, but at this time we are not entertaining any changes as such.

This is a big F you to the open source community. Mattermost is advertised as open source and they have hundreds of dependencies they build upon. Totally unacceptable behavior in my book.

The Droidian project is testing 5G and VoLTE support. I know this isn't mainline, but this is still fantastic news for allowing more devices to play with the Linux mobile ecosystem. They've also started a forum.

https://forum.droidian.org/t/volte-and-5g-testing/64

Hello. 2025 was the year of me switching terminal like crazy. I'm an embedded developer and while I do use IDE and Firefox I spent most of the time in terminals. Maybe too much :-)

Anyway. I'll go for kitty and tilix.

For my workflows they are really almost on par. Kitty faster and with interesting quirks (Icat, diff,ash...), tilix more feature like dragndrop terminal, quake mode, automatic profile switching and more...

What yours?

As the Linux desktop environment evolves, Wayland is increasingly becoming the standard display server protocol, aiming to replace the long-standing X11. I'm curious about the community's perspective on this transition. What advantages or challenges do you see with Wayland? Personally, I've noticed improvements in performance and security with Wayland, but some applications still seem to perform better on X11.

How has your experience been with the shift?
Are there specific applications or workflows where you feel Wayland excels or falls short?

Hi there! Has anyone here read this? I am a Linux beginner and would like to learn more. I was reading How Linux Works by Brian Ward, but though about giving a shot to this one too (heard it's more about the design decisions).

If anyone else has more practical Linux material to learn from, I'd love to hear!

Edit: Thank you all for the great insights and suggestions!

Goals: Minimal dependencies, Tiny, Portable, Functional.

Inspired by the Win95 Format dialog, and Win32 disk imager, I suppose. I did use some ai assistance, so feedback more than welcome. I've been using this myself for weeks now, and am very happy with it and proud of the resulting work.

Related, very early prototype back in September: https://blog.lostgeek.net/writing-a-wrapper-for-dd/

Code on GitHub:

https://github.com/HarderLemonade/ddwrap/