I think, main problem with ubuntu is that its basically rebranded debian with few additions. It had its own DE in past, but now it uses mainline gnome3 with few tweaks (installable on any distro with gnome3 in packages)... so yeah - its basically debian with fancy gtk theme (I like their font tho - using it right now on my arch laptop). And people generally tend to hate this sort of distros. Same goes for mint - its just rebranded ubuntu with few additions. But, at least, they still develop their own DE...

Also, regarding mint - I still remember a security breach that happened not much time ago and resulted in many people getting malware from an official source. In my opinion, its a GIANT flaw that speaks for itself.

I've actually just installed Zorin OS on an old Toshiba laptop (from 2008). I've dabbled with mint and a few other distros with live USBs before, but Zorin definately has it in the looks dept. I installed the "Lite" version due to the systems age and specs, but also the accesibility of the desktop itself (coming from windows).

I doubt I'll be able to game much on it - its from 2008 and overheats when pushed, but ive manged to load some dosbox games without issue. I'm mostly just using it to get used to basic Linux stuff and as a media player.

One issue I do have is the browser - its chromium and its pretty slow due to the machines age / specs. can anybody reccomend a good lightweight one?

They do a bit more than merely rebrand it with "a few additions". Also in my experience Mint works a lot better than Ubuntu does. I remember that - someone hacked their website & changed the download links to point to compromised versions. However they did address the issue quickly and strengthened their security. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

Luckly I only downloaded but not installed Mint back then.
My email was compromised tho.

There's nothing wrong with Ubuntu, as far as I'm concerned. Debian with it's "obsolete by design" attitude removed from the most popular packages. My main issue with Ubuntu is the same issue I used to have with Red Hat when it occupied the same position: people think it's the only way to do Linux, and, in particular, 3rd party software caters only to Ubuntu (see e.g. gog.com). Even when I used Ubuntu on one of my machines, I didn't use it raw, unconfigured, as Canonical and/or GNOME intended (e.g. I use rxvt and fvwm, not some bloated incompatible ternimal or a window manager that can't even get the simple things right). I could also complain about the low quality of the Ubuntu user-supplied technical help, but I don't really care unless that advice creeps its way into packages supplied by my distro. Apparently nobody knows how to do shell quoting properly, for one. Not that Ubuntu's sage advisers are alone with that.

Anyone else run into BIOS/UEFI/firmware updaters being only for Windows? Happened to me this week again. I doubt they do that BS for server motherboards. Could one use Wine for something like this? How about other tools that are Windows exclusive, like fan controllers?

Fixed it.

I'm thinking about including as many relevant resources as possible in the OP. Right now I'm in the middle of linking to popular and/or good distributions. Feel free to suggest material in the thread. It could be anything from missed distributions to relevant guides and overview videos or something else that's helpful.

I think gaming tools are some of the more glaring omissions. Eg, the last time I looked all the serious equivalents to MSI Afterburner (glxosd) or xpadder (QJoypad) were obsolete / abandoned / discontinued. And Logitech Gaming Software (used to program extra mouse buttons, control LED's, sensitivity, etc) is Win / Mac only.

ASUS same, all for Windows only.

There's not much you can do about the slow browser, today's websites full of javascript tax the computer hardware very high, even GOG "new post window" is slow AF, sometimes taking seconds between keyboard button press and actual word display. To be fair, today is the fastest I've seen in some time.
I've found the palemoon browser a few years back in a very light weight Linux distro and as far as I know is one of the "faster" on lower end hardware that still functions properly on most websites. (I still use it along with firefox)
If you use touch screen on your laptop (unlikelly but is important neither the less) Chromium is the only browser I've tried that is smooth and accurate.

My Dell laptop supposedly supports firmware updates via placing the update EXE into an appropriate FAT filesystem, but the update they provide doesn't work. It gets loaded and then it aborts with "invalid update file" or something like that. One of the 3 reasons I hate my current laptop, and Dell support just ignores me because I don't run Windows.

And no, you can't use wine. It requires low-level access to your hardware.

Why “even GOG”? I think GOG is one of the slowest websites I regularly use. It's the only one that does not work on a slow internet connection (e.g. mobile with reduced speed after the fast traffic is used up) at all.

Endless scrolling on every page is a nightmare if you want to use a browser on a computer without huge amounts of RAM.

–––

Back to question of a fast browser. You can't get more lightweight than lynx, but unfortunately most websites don't work anymore due to horrible web design trends. It crazy that we are at a worse place than when everything was made out of tables. Hundreds of megabytes of traffic wasted to display the contents of a DIN A4 page.

Ive tried chromium on a few systems - its always slow and "chuggy" (i think its shit really). I didnt think palemoon was available for linux. I use that as my main browser on windows so will check it. cheers!

Good to see that appdb.winehq.org has been abandoned in favor of one for yet another vendor-specific variant of wine. Reminds me of the good old days, when winex/cedega filled that role. I'm glad they're gone, at least. I would very much like to see both of these threads disappear. Extremely long threads that cover multiple subjects do not work well, on any forum. Perhaps once a thread gains a certain number of posts, it should become a subforum of its own. I am especially annoyed with the latter, because appdb is a more appropriate place to store game-specific information, and also because when people ask about wine support in a more appropriate gog place, such as the release thread or the game-specific forum, someone inevitably comes along and tells them to go visit the insane thread instead.

edit: I'm not even sure what possessed me to post in this thread, other than boredom, given that it's destined to be just as bad as the two I just maligned.