Just as long as it isn’t a .rar.

Going by their Mastodon account, seems they were erroneously detected as “from a US-sanctioned region” and it took too long for said error to be resolved, so they just made the switch.

I’m not a classic Linuxer (I switched in 2015) but I did once try Mandrake out of historical curiosity. From what I hear it was the recommended “beginner-friendly” distro before Ubuntu came out. And based on how hard it was to get working on a VM, I now understand why classic Linuxers talk about Ubuntu like it was this huge sea change.

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

Debian needs a better installer. It’d be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn’t install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).

F-Droid is the more valuable app store anyway. I always check there before Google Play.