here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.

it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.

if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.

if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.

if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.

there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”

if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.

when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.

the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?

but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…

not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.

not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.

so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.

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off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that’s not a hindrance for your use case and it’ll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

if you’re adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.

“rebooting” is not a thing ova here. yeah, you can accomplish that but that’s not what you want. utilising something like InputRemapper + e.g. Plasma shortcuts, you can launch a big-picture UI, like steam or plama-bigscreen when it’s ready or somesuch, when you press a key combo on the controller or mouse or keyboard or any combination thereof.

it’s using mpv under the hood, so I guess it should be able to play audio headless. I’m using allcast to cast to it and control it.

I’m using macast as a media renderer, for video and audio. don’t know if there’s a docker container for it.

ubuntu because everything works.

in case you can’t stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you’re set.

two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won’t come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won’t wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I’ll dig up the the script.

stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.

because they used to be special. “I run linux”, matrix text on boot, typing shit in the terminal, “I’m in”, awe-inspiring shit to an onlooker…

but nowadays, anyone can run ubuntu or mint or whatevs and our hero ain’t special no more. so here comes the ultimate delimiter.

my annoyance with his output aside, can we make it so that you can’t use “beautiful” on your own shit? others can say your stuff is, you can’t go “I created a beautiful xy”.

to each his own, but I can’t stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject “horror” that’s systemd, his “helpful” notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.

so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it’s needed in the case of MX.

don’t know about that latitude, but for the thinkpad you’d do well to disable the nvidia graphics in BIOS setup. intel graphics is adequate for daily stuff and you can actually use the thing as a mobile device i.e. on battery,

mint uses X11 which should be considered legacy at this point. wayland (Gnome, Plasma) has all the touch and dock/undock and rotate and pen etc goodies. try it out from a liveUSB and decide for yourself.

this one, OP. no need to introduce the horror that’s a:

• hosted app (why?!)
• client app is electron crapware
• the client app doesn’t even have full functionality, you have to use the web UI for some tasks

edit: I’m obviously speaking about the bitwarden/vaultwarden horror. keepassXC is none of them things.

I used enpass for years and was a happy user. one day it prompted me for some re-authentication bullshit security theater. although in that instant it was an easy task, took me all of 10 seconds, it demonstrated a scary amount of power they had as I couldn’t bypass it and access my data. from that point on, its days were numbered.

the second issue is the export functionality that was seriously lacking and I had to resort to 3rd party converter tools to convert it to keepassXC; no way that flew by their QC, it had to be intentional.

you’re running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.

what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn’t being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it’s not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.

wayland isn’t new, it’s default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the rd.live.ram switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn’t touch your SSD.

gnome sushi (installed by default in gnome) handles the press space to preview file. not a fully fledged editor but still miss the thing in plasma.

kodi and its derivatives are not something you should be using. it’s shit software on so many levels and we should burn it in the deepest volcanos we got.

try one of these:

1. run lineageOS TV (konstakang images) on it and install regular ATV apps for the services mentioned. so, like googletv except there’s no spying and ads and shit.

2. create a normal linux box that has a DLNA sink e.g. using macast. there’s no remote control, you use your android/iOS device to send it stuff, like movie from Jellyfin or a youtube video, and it plays it back and allows some control (pause, play, rew/ff, etc)

3. dedicated Jellyfin box; same as 2) but boots right into jellyfin client. it can be run in TV mode where it reacts to only up/down/left/right/enter/back, via gamepad or remote controller. if yours isn’t recognised, you can emulate it with InputRemapper.

not familiar with how twitch does stuff.

you also have the option of installing a normal raspi distro and then using a wireless keyboard and mouse/touchpad to run it, but I am of the opinion that once the device gets placed by the TV, it loses all keyboard and mouse privileges and should only be operated via the TV’s remote.

eons ago I heard and internalised an awesome phrase: “don’t analyze the problem - solve it”.

in that vein, install it yourself and ship the laptop to him. don’t matter what it cost, it’s not like it’s gonna bankrupt you and it’s not like you’re gonna do this multiple times per year.

you’re 100% in control of everything and that’s the next best thing to being there and doing it for yourself. you’re gonna figure out how to remotely do half of the things you mention across CGNATs and whatnot? I am sure you got better things to do; I know dad has.