Why not just use something like Synergy so you can control both machines from the mouse+kb at your desktop? Just enable the software when you need to and you can move the mouse off the edge of the screen and onto the other machine as if it were a second monitor. That’s what I do with laptop + desktop setups. Get a small cheap Ethernet switch so you can plug both machines in.

I don’t even need passively cooled, solid state airjet cooling would be perfect for a <20W arm machine.

ASUS machines have solidly good Linux support these days thanks to the asus-linux community effort. Any of their newer machines (~2021-2023) will fulfill your ask. I’ve had a good experience with the 2021 g15 and the 2022 X16 - I’m using the X16 as a work laptop right now.

They’re also completely missing the point of distro kernel trees. Stable automatically selects patches from mainline (largely by keyword, and often without kernel developer feedback or involvement) and consequently has a massive amount of code churn and very little validation beyond shipping releases and waiting for regression reports. Distro trees are the buffer where actual testing happens before release. As a long term stable user it really isn’t suitable for end user or enterprise consumption unless you have your own in house validation process to test releases for regressions before deployment. Even running stable on client machines (desktops, laptops) leads to a bad time every few weeks when something sneaks in that breaks functionality.

Wait until you discover ventoy

If they’re proactive about taking patches this will really help reduce issues with the dkms driver

I mean, Canonical is a for profit company so I’m not sure what anyone was expecting. Ubuntu had its moment in the sun where it was considered the newbie friendly Linux distro for free users but now they’re going pretty hard for corporate customers and enterprise features. Which is fine, they need money to stay afloat and some enterprises are into them so more power to them - they contribute a lot of time and money to various Linux projects. They’re the Debian derived redhat equivalent these days and that’s okay, if they pivot too far in their own interest people will just stop using their distro.

Gnomes workflow is a big departure from windows, but with its gesture navigation on a trackpad, I think it’s a highly superior way to use a laptop. My desktop gets KDE Plasma, but if I had a laptop it would use gnome

+1, GNOME dumps the whole desktop and taskbar thing in favor of gestures and the overview. Once you get a feel for it I think it’s honestly a lot more usable than traditional taskbar and desktop icon GUIs.

Honestly anything shipping a MATE desktop edition would be good too. MATE is similar enough to windows that most people get it pretty quickly.

Man they’re ahead of schedule, GTK3 isn’t even obsolete yet

This is something in the libva/mesa hardware acceleration stack

Something is broken in your hardware acceleration stack, I’d check out the verification and troubleshooting sections here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration.

The tiny excerpt from VLC you’ve included doesn’t give us enough info to see what’s broken but taking a wild stab at it I’d guess it’s libva, mesa or a regression in amdgpu. Take a look at the system journal (and user journal) as well as the VLC log, something in the library stack is probably throwing a more useful error than we’ve seen yet.

Gaming support is still very much a work in progress all up and down the software stack. Stable distros like Debian tend to ship older proven versions of packages so their packaged software can be up to 18mo behind current releases. The NTSync kernel code that should improve Windows game performance isn’t even scheduled for mainline merge until the 6.10 kernel window in a few weeks - that’s not likely to be in a stable Debian release for a 12-18mo.

TL;DR: Gaming work is very much ongoing and Arch moves faster than Debian does. Shipping 12-18mo old versions of core software on the Steam deck would degrade performance.

Arch packaging is also significantly easier to work with in my experience. I’ve packaged for both for some years and I’ll take the Arch build system over wrangling dpkg every chance I can.

GNOME extensions pick up a lot of slack if you want a dock or other UI features, extensions.gnome.org has a whole host of useful customizations. I also use a quick search/run popup launcher (ulauncher) so I don’t have to dip into the overview unless I want to see all of my open windows or drag things between workspaces.

I’m not really into the whole “which DE is better” thing. I think if you like one or the other you should just use it and get on with your life - trying to prove that one or the other is outright better is a waste of time, DE choice is entirely down to preference.

That said, I really like GNOME - it largely just gets out of the way and allows you to focus on what you’re doing. The overview and workspace handling in GNOME is top notch IMO and everything I want to launch or find can be accessed quickly with hotkeys or other shortcuts. My main beef with KDE is that it’s both too customizable and yet not quite customizable enough, when I try it every couple of years I inevitably spend a couple of days configuring settings to suit, get annoyed that I can’t quite get it to do what I want and promptly relog into a GNOME session.

Speaking of - OP, if you want to compare the two just install KDE on Arch and start a KDE session from your login manager. You don’t have to pick one or the other, you can try both and compare them before you make your distro switch.

Distro watch numbers have been a meme forever. If you want your favorite distro ranked higher make a robot to refresh its distro watch page and that distro’s rank will go up. That’s all distro watch has ever been.

Unfortunately that’s a level of technical aptitude that a lot of non technical people don’t have. I’d love it if my mom could manage installing software but she’s the sort of person who gets nervous when things like UI button locations change, she’s not someone who’s going to install their own printer drivers or packages or manage a dist upgrade herself. It would be nice if she would spend the time to learn enough to take care of her own devices but anything more complicated than managing phone updates isn’t likely.

For gaming, sure - proton has gone a really long way toward making most Windows games playable on Linux without too much effort.

For non technical users? Not so much, ChromeOS is putting in more work there.

Linux implies an IT burden that I don’t see most non technical users carrying without someone there to provide IT support. My mom, for example, won’t ever touch Linux because I’m damned well not going to provide on call support for that. ChromeOS though? That’s set and forget enough for the non technical crowd.

/2¢

We’ve had seemingly endless support issues with mediatek WiFi over the last 2-3y in the asus-linux community. Most people have either pulled their mediatek cards and replaced them with intel or have just gotten used to rebooting every time they have a mediatek driver issue.

I just chuck an add in NIC in and ignore the onboard LAN hardware. Wireless is usually an m.2 board and easily replaced as well. Total cost there is like $30 for both if you pick both up on fleaBay.