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) so I was very impressed that the MX Linux USB stick booted
up in less than a minute.
Alas, it was not to be. My hard drives were partitioned for RAID 1, and
the MX installer simply couldn't cope with it. I ended up having to
completely nuke my drives using the Fedora boot disk for MX to install
itself, and then it wouldn't boot.
I'd already spent four days battling this problem, including having lost
work because of it (which is not something I'm too happy about, during
lockdown). So didn't have time to mess about any further trying to get
it to work, so I bit the bullet and reinstalled Fedora. So I'm (almost)
back to square one before the SSD died, except that now I have to spend
another week or so reconfiguring everything back to the way I had it
before.
Lessons learned:
- SSDs are crap. Fast, expensive crap, but still crap.
- 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.)
- Fedora's file system check on a failed SSD is crap. 22 hours of
checking, to get nowhere.
- Never, ever enable "Fast boot" in the BIOS.
- MX Linux looks good, feels good, shame the installer doesn't work.
- The Kool Kids(TM) in Linux land decided that RAID was soooo 2010s.
Don't believe them.
- Fedora will RAID your swap, because insanity.
- 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.
- If I didn't need a more recent browser to use the internet, I would
totally stick to mid-2000s tech.
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 :-(
--
Steve