I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.

I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.

Evacuation in my ass? Sounds about right.

I landed on Claws Mail myself. It does look a bit dated, but the UI is functional and the client works. I’m content with it.

Despite the inherently probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, do you think the universe is deterministic?

Librewolf, which is great, but I have been desperate for alternatives for a long time now. I also use Falkon and Gnome Web on the side and those are ok, but unfortunately not on the level of Firefox and its ilk. I’ve been considering Waterfox and GNU IceCat also, but honestly the overall situation is depressing. Currently, Librewolf ticks most of my boxes, but every browser has some issue or another that I’m not keen on. I have no idea what the next step is.

Distros packaging software means that it is available to install with the package manager from their repositories. No distro provides every piece of software out there. This can be mitigated with Flatpak, Snap, GUIX, AppImage or, in a pinch, by compiling the required program yourself.

Sounds like you’ve already done most of the work. From what you’ve said, Fedora with Plasma sounds great for your use case. Good luck on your journey and glad to have you aboard!

With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.

Turns out this is also available in Alpine repositories, so I went ahead and installed it on my phone. Could come in handy when browsing from public Wi-Fi or such. Thanks for the tip.

You can do a really slim install of Debian that should work. For DE I recommend LXQT.

If you’re feeling adventurous, Alpine might be slightly lighter. It’s a good distro.

Those specs are not going to get you a terribly fast experience, but my laptop runs Debian ok and it’s in the same ballpark.