These are the instructions at the mint forum.

Yes, I have 2 computers running off of USB with Mint, with persistence. And I’ve set up that for my father in law and a friend too. You boot with one drive, you insert the other one, you UNMOUNT it, and then you load the installer. Please note though, that the bootloader will be installed into the internal drive instead of the usb one. To go around this problem, would be best to disable the internal drive temporarily during installation (either in the bios, or just remove its cable). Then the installer will be forced to write the bootloader on to the usb stick.

I usually set up the partitions as such: 1 GB of fat32 boot partition with the boot flag set, a 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).

Yes, it’s a true install, not a live cd.

You can install Mint on a usb drive, or external ssd. I personally run it on two of my machines where the internal drive died, on a usb stick. These wear out, but hey, for now, it works. So get a second usb, and install it there, or nuke Windows to get it to run well.

I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it’s very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.

I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.

Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it’s a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is). Your CPU scores 3500 points on the passmark cpu benchmark which is enough for any kind of distro. 15 years ago, the average laptop cpu was 600 points (and Linux still runs fine on these with something like Debian/Xfce).

The lowest ram usage I’ve seen with a full-fledge modern distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).

Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.

I think XFce supports quite a few themes for the window manager that completely changes how the window borders look like.

The truth is that none will allow you what you have in your mind exactly, unless you get down dirty and start programming it. However, some DEs are more customizable than others, e.g. KDE is more customizable than Gnome, for example.

Not nearly as low in memory usage. Xubuntu requires 1.1 GB of RAM on a clean boot for example. Lubuntu close to 700 I think.

No, that thing is unusable. It has no niceties to help a user do basic things. The best OS I’ve found that has enough GUI tools to do stuff, is Q4OS. Uses 350 MB of RAM, but it has enough stuff to get you going. I looked more into FunOS btw, and it requires quite some terminal work to even get tap-to-click to work. It’s missing some GUI tools for basic things. It doesn’t even save screen resolution changes without editing X11 files. If they get these things implemented, then sure. Same goes for all the other lite OSes, like AntiX, DSL, etc. Lightweight, yes. But not really usable by an ordinary user. They are missing GUI tools, of if they have them (like in the case of antix and puppy), they are a complete and utter MESS. I’ve used all of them, and they have left me very, very underwhelmed. Until then, Q4OS is the best of the lightweight distros. It’s well put together.

If it’s true that it uses only 250 MB of RAM as it claims, then it had advantages on old computers over Mint which uses 950 MB (htop). My mom’s computer only has 2 GB of RAM for example (an old, converted-to-linux Chromebook), so we need a distro that really doesn’t use much ram. Thankfully she only uses 1 tab at a time on the browser (she doesn’t know how to open more), so that makes it just enough with something heavy like YT or FB, so she doesn’t hit the swap and slow things down.

For home folder encryption it’s easiest to install encryption during install time. There’s an option for that when you create your partitions (might be hidden under an “advanced” button or something). I’d also go with vanilla Mint and not LMDE due to being newer, and with more support for hw (ubuntu base has better support than debian base imho). So yeah, I’d say, re-install to have it easier.

For mass-renaming, install Thunar: sudo apt install thunar

…and renice.

Some .deb files do include repo information (e.g. Chrome), but most don’t.

It says right in the customer comments on Amazon that it’s compatible with Linux.

It’s my real name :D

I’m an artist, and I have that version too, running it under qemu/Win10 (it won’t run on Wine), under my Debian-Testing main OS. However, I have actually moved to Gimp 3 recently for all my work. I use it to make collages ( https://www.instagram.com/eugenia_loli ) and edit my scanned watercolor paintings: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli The only problem is that Gimp can’t read my old PSDs that have adjustment layers correctly, so I load them first either on that old Photoshop, or online on Photopea, and then export them as TIFFs, to load them back to Gimp. For my newer work, I just use Gimp all the way.

Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don’t worry, you’ll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory.

Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.

After a few days, you’ll be understanding what’s going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.

I prefer the UI of Shotcut, but kdenlive is admittedly more powerful. You can try both to see which one you prefer. I suggest you download the .appimage files of both of them from the website (this way you’ll get the latest versions). I’d suggest against the flatpak versions as sometimes they come with limitations of various kinds. Just download their respective .appimage files, make them executable (right click on the downloaded files with your file manager and then go to their Properties to set them as executable), and then double click them to load. If you go that route, make sure you manually update them every 3 months or so, as that’s when they usually release updates.

Windows apps (particularly ones that require that kind of acceleration) are unlikely to work with Wine. And if they do, either they’ll be crashy, or they can break at any consequent Wine update. Forget Windows apps. Windows games that are invoking only fullscreen 3D are much more likely to work on Linux because the part that gets re-interpreted is simpler. But apps, that use obscure optimization Windows APIs are a pain to get good support of.

So, I suggest you install kdenlive or Shotcut to do video editing. Even Davinci resolve is a hit or miss on Linux and it doesn’t support AAC at all. So get it done with the two OSS apps I suggested instead. In another life I was a music video director for local bands, and so I was doing a lot of color grading, invoking tricks and things that FOSS apps can’t do. I switched full time to Linux and FOSS apps, and I just do the basic color grading now. It was sad to see that part of the fun go, but that’s what I had to do.

Additionally Filmora is a primarily Chinese company, probably mining data, so it’s best to not use it. Same for CapCut.

These are just dependencies for your packages. However, Arch doesn’t automatically clean the downloaded files after installation so that ends up taking space. On my Dell laptop that has only a 64 GB eMMC, the installation package files took and whopping 5 GB of space, sitting there doing nothing. I nuked them (it didn’t remove the installed apps and libs, only the already used package files). Run: sudo pacman -Scc