Get base Debian, you’ll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it’s specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I’m trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I’d recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

Me, because someone at my work picked it for servers back in the day

Vscode and gitlens for routine stuff, and then just CLI when push comes to shove and I need some more advanced feature.

Omelette

Yeah we’re gonna use like 1 tanker for that, 2 on a busy day. The 28 others are going somewhere else

Obviously supporting the important work here, just couldn’t resist

Gastrointestinal rights hotline?

(Yes I can infer what it’s about but as non-American I have zero idea what it concretely stands for…)

I have an external storage unit a couple kilometers away and two 8TB hard drives with luks+btrfs. One of them is always in the box and after taking backups, when I feel like it, I detach the drive and bike to the box to switch. I’m currently researching btrbk for updating the backup drive on my pc automatically, it’s pretty manual atm. For most scenarios the automatic btrfs snapshots on my main disks are going to be enough anyway.

Yeah, that’s a fancy ass sauna but wouldn’t really serve its purpose properly…

Way to summarize a two party system