Steven D'Aprano composed on 2021-10-06 21:03 (UTC+1100):
Thank you to everyone for your suggestions, I was especially happy with the look and feel of MX Linux. I'm used to booting up with Fedora taking five or six minutes (going up to 20 or 30 minutes when it runs a file system check)
That never happened to me using Fedora whether with Plasma or TDE. I have several installations of TDE on Fedora 33 & 34 on both HDD and SSD but not RAID.
- Applications that store their vital user-critical data in the same hidden directory as their disposable temporary and cache data are evil. (I'm looking at you, Firefox and Firefox plugins.)
This is configurable. Firefox cache/tmp and other data need not be in ~/.mozilla. Both can be moved to separate elsewheres by changing
~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini
and in each profile directory's prefs.js
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory"
- Fedora's file system check on a failed SSD is crap. 22 hours of checking, to get nowhere.
Fedora's fsck is the same one other distros use. A failed SSD will be a problem no matter what is on it.
- Never, ever enable "Fast boot" in the BIOS.
It works OK here on the few PCs I set it on, mostly Dells.
- The Kool Kids(TM) in Linux land decided that RAID was soooo 2010s. Don't believe them.
I've been using RAID1 on my primary PC for too long to remember. 3 years ago I took the OS off of the HDD RAID and put it on an SSD, so only my data is on the RAID.
- Fedora will RAID your swap, because insanity.
Fedora, like other distros I'm familiar with, allows deviation from defaults during installation. Neither RAID nor LVM nor BTRFS are a must in it or any other distro. Fedora is considered by many to be "bleeding edge", which sounds like the opposite of your interest: stability. Most TDE repos are built for non-"bleeding edge" distros.
- I pulled out my old PC with KDE 3 on it, so at least I could do email and search the Internet. (T)KDE is still the best desktop environment since Mac OS 6 in the 1990s. I miss it.
KDE3 is still available on openSUSE, though not until after a standard installation is complete. It's in an optional repo.
Thanks again for your attempt to help. I may try upgrading Fedora and seeing if I can get TDE working on that. When I can afford another two day downtime :-(
Two days' downtime isn't normal for installing an OS, but a bad SSD isn't normal either. It takes me roughly 3 hours to install and customize any distro. I mostly avoid live distros, with main exception being Knoppix.