Can’t answer for all your requirements but for the gist of it I’m guessing you’d like KDE. I guess you’d like Kate as your text editor and Krename as your file rename tool. It comes with some Windows-y keyboard shortcuts set by default as Win+L to lock the screen (and ask for your password).

Can’t tell about ffmpeg nor mpv GUI frontends as I’m more of a cli person but I seem to recall there are several KDE/Qt frontends for mpv and it won’t be surprising if there’s one for ffmpeg too.

As for your distro question I’d try Fedora if I were you, though you might feel adventurous and try with Arch (and surely you’ll learn a thing or two about Linux and your computer).

Other than that, the nice people in here surely can give you better options.

I’m old and my gateway to Linux was Ubuntu 5.10 via a live CD they gave me at uni back in 2006.

I got to experience it when they used to take seriously their “Linux for human beings” motto.

Those were GNOME 2 and kernel 2.x times. Albeit the limitations of the technology (40GB HDD disk, 256 MB RAM, an Intel Xeon processor which I can’t remember it’s exact specs) it felt way snappier (no pun intended) than Windows. You could felt they cared about it in that brown visual theme, the icons, the sounds, the way the documentation was phrased - you could feel the Ubuntu in it.

I ended wiping my entire docs drive while trying to install it but got to learn lots of stuff and feel like my computer was actually mine.

Same as for many people my generation, I switched to Linux thanks to that Ubuntu. It’s really sad what it has become and the poor, selfish decisions they have taken, but still it keeps holding a special place in the Linux memories.

That means the lack of huge software like Gnome

Been using Gentoo since Jan 2009 and one of the reasons I moved to it and never looked back was because it let me tailor “huge software” like KDE to my needs, with the aid of USE flags and sets. That’s what an actual customizable distro let you to do. If you want to use “smaller software” like, say, Openbox, it won’t get in your way either.

So that point of “centered around smaller software” strucks as weird to me - it goes against the “customizability” point and, ironically, the very Linux kernel is “huge software”…

If you make your own he’s looking forward to seeing it.

Not a programmer whatsoever but I’ve heard about Zig and people comparing it to Rust, what’s the deal with it?

But it wasn’t “win XP mode”, and if you take a look, it doesn’t look like it at all - it was an attempt from RedHat to provide a consistent look to both GNOME and KDE. There were Windows ports of Bluecurve.

(TIL Bluecurve caused a domino effect that made a developer quit RedHat)

For what it’s worth, yesterday this thing was mentioned here.

I installed Fedora on a 2015 MacBook pro. It works well, though the camera doesn’t work and bt is bonky, to say the least - but I couldn’t care less about that.

Of course it’s a good thing, but it’s not something Gentoo is particuarly goot at it (nor any distro, that is) but its detractors claim Gentoo says is “lean on resources” only to “debunk” that.

And the myth that is “supercomplicated”, but in the end the only “difficult” part is to install it - in the daily, pedestrian usage it’s pretty much like any other (rolling release) distro. Well, of course except package installation/update times, but it’s beyond to me why people created that false urgency of needing to have everything installed and updated the second you issued the command. It’s not like you won’t be able to use your computer at all while Portage does its thing.

Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.

True and false; the “something special” in Gentoo is that you can tailor it to fit to your needs, and as far as I know no other distro comes even close - maybe the now almost defuct Funtoo. The “it’s more lean on resources” always seemed to me like a strawman people don’t like it came up with to diss on Gentoo.

Not a fan of semi-serif fonts, and not digging the rounded “corners” on E and L (while having sharp ones in lowercase L and lowercase i), but it seems it is trying to be highly readable so indeed it should be great for UI stuff. And doing a complete typeface covering such huge character map is no easy job.

It depends on who you ask. If you ask this to a M$ refugee, they will praise it. If you ask a *BSD user, they will bitch about it.

Great, now the next time I’ll use nano I surely will forget about this and get frustrated when trying to save a file with Ctrl+O

The problem I had with nano is that, for the time being, it was supposed to be easy to use. With that in account I always get lost when saving a file and closing the thing because one’s used to doing something else with Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X.

Whereas with Vim (and Neovim for a little while, and now with Vis) I knew it had a steep learning curve from the start so I always had it in mind. And all the funny stories about quitting vim.

First and foremost, that my hardware peripherals work with it (wifi card, camera, bt stuff if you have it…) - if not (and hope you don’t nor would be frustrated by it happens), that there’s a way to make it work

I mean, if the intention is to reflect the utterly bad decisions Mozilla has made, this new logo would be spot on

I liked the icon only (“mac-style”) layout they had in KDE 4.

Yeah, no. That’s not how the real world works. It’s funny to feel entitled but I can imagine my peers at my previous work saying go fuck myself if I ever told them they had to install whatever-you-say in order to be able to reach to you.

I miss that Ubuntu. You know, the one when they took the “Linux for human beings” motto seriously.

If GeckOS isn’t already taken, it could be kinda cool.

Cantarell has served us well, but we’ve been wondering if it would be more beneficial to default to a more modern and well-maintained typeface

Eh. I don’t feel Cantarell “dated” or “not modern”. I don’t even use GNOME anymore but I reckon Cantarell is actually a great font, it’s legible and has character. It’s almost like you can tell it’s about GNOME when you see Cantarell somewhere. If I were them I’d invest into giving it more weights (I’d really like it if it had a lighter version), variations and extending it. They have the power and resources to do so.

imho they’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist. Inter’s default is a poor choice, as some of you have already noted here.