First, thanks to everyone for their suggestions. My goal is to give those who are at a fork in the road due to Microsoft's misbehavior a good -- and *easy* -- reason to follow the non-Microsoft path (in the way that Graphene OS lets us to keep Google and Apple off our phones). This requires dealing with two reliable sources, Debian and TDE. Most of those who do "Debian-based" distributions attach themselves as kind of parasites, ala Canonical. Glad no one mentioned Mint.
There are a lots of interesting projects, but they go beyond the scope of the article.
said jacobheinrich--- via tde-users:
| One issue I am running into is hosting my debian repo (it appears it | makes my hosting service unhappy). However one goal, and this is where I | think my solution has its upsides, once installed matrixOS is nothing | more than a Debian system with Vanilla TDE on top, it simply swims on | its own. I do not want a Q4OS situation where you are married to their | repos going forward.
Precisely.
I'll postpone a week, then, and see if you get it up and running. It's too bad that Debian doesn't offer a version with TDE, as it does just about everything else.
If it doesn't work out, I'll just suggest that people download the Debian live CD with LXDE or LXQT, both of which while not ideal are acceptable. The current KDE is an overly complicated mess -- why do something in 15 seconds with TDE, when you can do it in 15 minutes with KDE? -- and Gnome is and always has been simply awful, entirely developer-driven.
So good luck! And may your move go smoothly.