Well these days we have flatpak to solve the “not in the repo” (or ‘old version in the repo’) problem.

I am no programmer either, mainly a technical-oriented user, and I made the switch to a linux-only desktop almost 20 years ago. I tried several distros but I keep coming back to ubuntu (in vanilla gnome mode), with it’s closeness to debian and huge library of apps, with it’s massive userbase you get a lot of online community support, and it’s really polished these days. For the last 5-6 years or so I’ve been using “LTS” releases, doing major updates every two years, I found that to be a very reasonable cadence and it gives you great environment stability. The only significant downside I found these days is ubuntu’s insistence in using their (proprietary?) snap desktop container app ecosystem, I personally much prefer flatpaks, and actually I use flatpaks extensively on my ubuntu desktop for SW that needs frequent updating (darktable, logseq, etc)

Tilix [https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/] is missing from the list. My terminal of choice for the last (I lost count) however many years. Integrates nicely with gnome3+

This brings back so many memories! My first distro some 25 years ago now! Something to tell my kids about. I remember it took me a couple of days to get audio to work on my first install! And I still loved it. So much water has passed under the bridge. Now 100% of the production envirnoment at work is Linux-based and so are the devices at the other end of the wire/airlink. And so are our phones, home servers and on and on. Linux skills have had the highest return

Pi4 for HomeAssistant + audio streamer with a HiFiBerry card, with external SSD, google Coral stick for Frigate, and a Zwave stick. Running OSMC as OS.

Pi3b with OSMC as audio streamer

Small fanless HTPC on a six year old Apollo lake mini ITX mobo. Looking forward to upgrading this one soon with one of the recently announced alderlake N100 fanless mini itx mobos.