Absolutely. Look at Aeon. I turn it on and do what I need to do.

Later I might see a quick pop up that says system has been updated. It didn’t require intervention. It didn’t even tell me it was happening, it just informed me after the fact.

If anything broke, I would never know because on the next boot if something failed it just uses the previous snapshot to boot. As far as I am concerned the system is working just like it always has.

But even as recently as this week I see people saying: immutable? No don’t make it a bad experience for them! Just recommend Ubuntu for newcomers! >:/

Yes, but he also commented that the rust infrastructure isn’t super stable.

The point is that that Linus responses were not as overtly simplified and predictable as lung suggested.

But in Australia you CAN get an old Thinkpad, so…

Kalpa needs to attract more developers to keep up with Aeon’s pace. I understand it is usable as a daily driver, but it’s not just a one to one mirror of Aeon with Plasma on top.

https://sfalken.tech/posts/2024-06-08-how-do-aeon-and-kalpa-relate/

Richard Brown is all in on Aeon along with whatever contributors are helping him. Stephen Falken appears to have no one helping him work on Kalpa unfortunately. I disagree with Richard’s stance that Kalpa shouldn’t exist, but I do wish there were some capable people able to help that project.

I don’t mind using Gnome anyway, it actually does solve some networking issues that I’ve always had with Plasma. (Dolphin not handling it well whilst Gnome Files has no issues)

I’ve been using Opensuse Aeon just over a year and it’s done great.

Tumbleweed user for the last 5 years, and dealt with a few issues over that time. The usually infrequent update break that comes with rolling release. And the Opensuse ‘Patterns’ started, which I loathe and it’s a disaster to try to disable them every install.

Aeon hasn’t had any of those issues. It’s been very much a “turn it on and get to work”.

I’ve generally had less issues with Aeon than Tumbleweed - like certain flatpaks not crashing.

But downsides as I see them:

I’m not a gnome guy. It’s fine though, I don’t hate it. But some people can’t stand it.

I had a bit of trouble running wine. Something about the default security policy. There’s a known workaround.

I took it as a question of which distro looks nicest out of the box (like, which distro manager has made real effort to make something particularly nice looking).

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Not anymore

OpenTyrian and OpenTTD were my go-to games for many years. Both are easily found for Mint packaged with free assets.

Minetest, Mindustry, 0AD. I can’t speak for how well they’d run on Core 2 but I think they’d be fine.

OpenRA will get you some classic Command and Conquer. You can run them as Appimages on Mint, and on launch they give they option to download freely available assets.

FreeCiv if you want to get lost in some old school Civilisation.

GZdoom you can play with the FreeDoom assets.

And then there are some open source engines but you need to pair with commercial assets: CorsixTH for Theme Hospital ScummVM can run a whole bunch of older adventure games (some might even be free if you have a gog account) OpenRCT2 for Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 DevilutionX for og Diablo

Blast Em. https://www.retrodev.com/blastem/

Standalone (not retro arch). Modern emulator (don’t think it’s updated anymore though). Linux support. I think it’s also available on Flathub if you want to get it via there.

Or…

Ares. https://ares-emu.net

Multi system emulator originally developed by Near (rip). Yes, it plays more systems than you are looking for, but it is simple, standalone (no retroarch/libretro), very good, Linux support, and still updated (latest version 23 Jan). Also available on Flathub if you want it there.

I suggest to try these emulators, they’re modern and they aim for cycle accuracy, rather than finding a way to keep a 15 year old emulator running.