unity from ubuntu would have been perfect since that is exactly what it was designed for; but it’s not a thing anymore.

if the tablet has low specs; i would go with a minimalist distro like damn small or puppy linux.

Doesn’t work if you have encrypted disk

this this because you are unable to provide the encryption password?

other people have answered your question about syslog-ng and i thought i should share something that i wish someone had shared with me when i was studying up to on a job as an ELK administrator about a decade+ or so ago.

if you have familiarity with any of the non-journald based logging (eg rsyslog, syslog, etc.) and basic networking (eg tcpdump, traceroute, etc.) your experience will translate into syslog-ng well and there’s significant syntactical differences between the versions since it’s been around for decades now.

i’m glad you shared this because it’s forced me to take stock of all the time that has passed by as he explained his experiences with ubuntu.

i got especially nostalgic when he mentioned compiz and the feeling of being on the bleeding edge. it felt so bleeding edge that when ubuntu made that public mistake w grub in one of their earlier releases, it got me to consider buying a linux laptop; which i did a few years later permanently, until recently.

also: unity was awesome.

it sounds like you’re either missing a boot loader or it’s not configured correctly.

did you install grub on the vhdx? what’s the boot up order for your vm?

i see it as more a capability that i don’t always need beyond the minimum; but if you feel about it like this, you can also disable swap all together.

that makes much more sense; thanks for the correction.

i’ve come to this in the opposite direction as you. when i switched to linux full time; that middle mouse button wasn’t so ubiquitously set as you’ve described it (none of the windows systems i’ve owned had it); but the middle mouse button on linux has been ubiquitously set as a 2nd clipboard since the 1970’s.

i’ve grown so accustomed that the middle mouse button gives me a second copy/paste that i had trouble with it when i bought my first linux laptop and the built-in kde decided to mimic that window’s scroll just like you described it and i had to learn how to turn it off. lol

swap is usually significantly slower than ram; are you certain that you wan to use that instead?

is it more than a theme for i3?

That strikes me as an easy thing to miss; I would see the user agent string myself and let the project’s maintainers know about it

i’m surprised that alpine isn’t on that list since they went through all that effort to be “pure” linux.

i suspect that the biggest reason to use an enterprise distribution is the support since it helps shield you from the consequences of interoperability that naturally come out of the whole linux ecosystem of the right hand not knowing what the left had is doing.

if you can find the source deb package for it, you can use that to try to construct a version that’s appropriate for your release.

or at least it’s true to for rpm packages from the last time i encountered a barrier like this on centos.

i was wrong. i misread the article thinking that opensuse was going to turn into an analogue similar to centos stream ending up with suse eventually sun setting opensuse like red hat is doing with centos; but no, they’re ARE doing a centos stream like model but it’s going to be back and forth between opensuse leap and opensuse tumbleweed.

opensuse is back on the recommended list. lol

if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it

i take back what i said; i just discovered that suse isn’t going to support opensuse anymore.

i used to have a 2013 macbook air from the electronics disposal bin and used it for five years as my daily driver. i don’t know how well it would do considering all your audio related constraints; but in your shoes i would do some quick and dirty testing with a live linux distribution on usb drive.

i would go with elive because it comes preinstalled with proprietary software; including things for multimedia, like codecs. you could also do it w any other distro, but why not save yourself the extra steps; since we’re only looking for breadcrumbs to follow anyways.

i used to use a headset w a usb audio dongle circa 2002 on red hat linux and the breadcrumbs i found back then led me to discover that getting it to work required the proprietary software that the distros wouldn’t carry because of the licensing. so i spent days tearing apart my new installation trying to get it to work with the help of strangers on internet linux forums and ultimately failed; i later succeeded with mandrake linux and ran with that for about 3ish years before switching to debian and later elive.

elive has already figured out all the intricate details necessary to get that software to work and i’m inclined to believe that they made significant improvements over the last 20ish years. you can use the fruits of their labor for a quick and non-invasive test that can be the first breadcrumb that leads you to whatever you end up using for your two machines while ensuring your audio requirements will be met; maybe elive can also help with other proprietary software or maybe it’s people on the software that they use that are like yours.

also: you lost me on Focusrite Audio-Interface paragraph so i don’t understand how it fits into any of this.

do you have any intel related packages in your system? you can search with something like apt-cache search intel

if it turns out you don’t and you’re certain that it’s okay for you then you can probably add a repository for it.

i can’t stress enough the part where you need to be certain that you need it.

i use xfce, but entirely because it worked well when 16 megabytes of ram was considered average and it literally took almost a half hour to log in and start using a browser on both gnome and kde.

is mate as lightweight as xfce?