I just got my Starfive Visionfive2 this week, and yeah… not as easy to use a Raspberry Pi just yet.

Just don’t expect a smooth user experience yet, its’ software is still very much WIP. Google hasn’t even finished RISC-V support in Android yet.

I imagine OP had a neckbeard, belt and suspenders and was carrying a copy of Gödel-Escher-Bach.

Your setup is close to my 2015 very-much-non-gaming laptop, so… I’d recommend retro gaming and/or modern 2D games. A few suggestions would be: Baldur’s Gate 1-2, Icewind Dale 1, Xenonauts, Battle Brothers, Wildermyth, Shadowrun Returns (and sequels), Into the Breach, Fallout 1-2. If you’re into programming games, that hardware should run everything by Zachtronics as well as Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans.

I don’t use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I’d probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.

Yes, I found a guide for getting Photoshop CS6 running in wine (PlayOnLinux wrapper). A recent update to something broke it for me, but it might still work for others.

Out of curiosity, do you ever rescue laptops from your work and use or resell them?

Libreoffice is essentially full fat Office at this point. If you need any , more than what it offers, you’re more likely than not a computer savvy person already. Photoshop is hard to fully replace though. I ran it in wine for a long time, still haven’t found a good alternative.

Well, there’s always the devil you know… (Ubuntu)

Kate, Terminator, k4dirstat and the amazing clipboard history app in KDE.

Just to clarify a few points in #1: CISC has gone largely (entirely?) extinct, so it doesn’t play into this. Arm processors are more efficient than x86, but Risc-v is even more efficient than Arm, giving them an edge in cheap, low power computing. However, some companies have started experimenting with Risc-v for HPC applications, so it’s turning out more versatile than expected. Just this week there was also news of a bunch of companies banding together to develop Risc-v chips for automobile and Telecom, so don’t be surprised if we get Risc-v smartphones and tablets in the near future.

As someone who does all my Linux gaming in Kubuntu, why should OP avoid KDE?

Not OP, but I’ve been running Kubuntu since 2017 since it’s desktop environment looks and works very similar to Windows 7 (desktop with icons, taskbar, launcher, search, options, etc) which is what I was used to after running Windows for two decades before. It’s also stable and sees a lot of mainstream apps being ported to it.

They still haven’t figured out string handling?

JSP used to be the shit back in the day. Imagine server-side rendered html through Java. Nowadays it’s properly regarded as shit, fortunately.

I had a colleague who ran NixOS on his work laptop and loved it. He even held a presentation to the rest of the engineering dept about it. Then IT contacted him and said company policy only allowed running Ubuntu and he had to reinstall.

He resigned shortly after.

Plasma is amazing. I’m never going back to Gnome and am ready to become a contributor just because I like the DE so much.

Don’t use mono, use dotnet core instead.

It doesn’t support syncing contacts and calendars out of the box, but there are plugins that will let you sync both. I used Thunderbird successfully with MS365 in 2019-2020.

Snaps. Everyone seems to hate them for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons. But for me, they just work. And if Canonical gets out of line, there’s already been proof of concepts of third-party snap repositories, so that’s a moot point.

Flatpaks seem like a solution in search of a problem to me. Not everything is a gui app, so not sure why the devs aren’t supporting cli apps well. But the biggest problem is that most software I use simply isn’t available as flatpaks.