That looks like a cherry picked starting point. Read the whole thread for the full context.
fwiw, I don't think anyone comes out looking particularly good. However, attempting to describe Frenck as infamous here and now is a bit rich. That minor disagreement all happened during the pandemic and I'm sure we have all passed a lot of water since then.
"Gilfoyle" is an anagram of Cthulu.
This is from 2004: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/ibm-thinkpad-x31 It will chew amps (electricity). Recycle it as best you can. Grab a modern box instead.
Unless sparks are free where you live, this beast will become a liability very quickly.
It didn't exist!
You can find one for $100.
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
I run (one of three partners) a small IT company in the UK. I've always Linuxed since around 1998. After messing with RedHat, Mandrake, Yggdrasil and others I settled down and ran Gentoo for many years and then Arch for some more.
I'm gradually dumping the Windows servers and replacing with Linux based beasties. We are also in the throws of replacing VMware with Proxmox.
I also have a pretty decent Kbuntu based desktop/laptop effort. I've done Windows client deployments in the 1000s so I have quite a good idea about compliance etc. An Ubuntu based box can run several AV solutions, secure boot and full disc encryption. Buzz words perhaps but also audit points and will get you over the line for Cyber Essentials Plus (UK).
Libre Office works for me and I used to teach office suites in the 90's! Things have moved on since but a decimal alignment stop is a decimal alignment stop today too (do you know what that means?). I run our Exchange system, and I migrated it from GroupWise back in the day because the kool kids "required" it. Anyway, Evolution with EWS will get you full functionality for a client but with far less faff.
I'm taking my time. I already have at least two employees who are dyed in the wool Windows officianados begging me to migrate them to Linux. I will but it takes time. For example - "drive mappings" or in English: Remote mounts.
CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ . This is an easy to add Windows compat thing. Its rather good. For static desktops its fine but for laptops that move around a lot it can be hard to get the file system mounts working again quickly in a dynamic environment.
CID uses a PAM mount based system and in the past I used another one (autofs I think). However it seems to me that mounts are not dynamic or responsive enough. In the end it is Samba and that might need some fettling as well.
As I said earlier, I'm taking my time (I'm an engineer) but be assured that Linux is quite capable of driving your desktop.
My T shirt says:
Have you tried turning it off and on again
Use what works for you.
I started to answer your question with a list of stuff and then deleted the lot and started again:
What are you really after? Do you fancy a challenge or what?
transflexive LCD
LMGTFM (Me). Oh its easy to read (almost) regardless of light conditions. I too like my notification to be separated and discreetly delivered.
Sorry 8), thanks for the heads up. I'm filling in shipping info now.
Never heard of sh, I use bash and I call it as /usr/bin/bash (for security).
xfs has reflinks. That means you can copy huge wodges of data nearly for free on one filesystem. For backup systems this is a killer feature. Veeam rolling up incremental backups into the last full happens in seconds because pointers to blocks are juggled around rather than the data blocks themselves.
xfs has been around for a very, very long time. I use it for larger filesystems eg Nextcloud, Zoneminder and the like (and Veeam backup repos that are not object storage). I use ext4 by default.
pfSense boxes - zfs because the alternative is ufs.
RPi - OverlayFS (with ext4 and tmpfs) gets you a generally read only filesystem with changes held in RAM. Ideal for kiosks, appliances and keeping memory sticks alive.
Windows - NTFS, it works well and has streams and there aren't many other options (ReFS is a bit new but it does have reflinks)