said Ross Merrifield via tde-users:
| Maybe https://www.q4os.org/ would work? Never used it personally, but | it's Debian based and has a TDE option
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately "Debian-based" pretty much always means "uses the .deb package management and will run things from the Debian repository," kind of like television shows that are "based on a real story." There's always a catch. I learned that from Canonical, which was fine for awhile and well loved in the community, but then started charging for security updates and forcing "snap" packages, controlled by Canonical, onto its users. If it were based on Debian in a meaningful way, I should have been able to simply switch the entries in /etc/apt/sources.list from Ubuntu to Debian, do an update and upgrade, and be switched to Debian. But no. Can't trust any of the "based-on" distributions -- there's no guarantee.
That's why it pretty much *has* to be Debian, and for power and ease of use it pretty much *has* to be TDE. Talking people who have been on Windows through installing Linux and TDE would be a daunting task, which is why I'm so hoping to find a Debian/TDE respin.