Fair point. Support for this may be tricky.

Although I think something like replacing a drive is doable by an average consumer given enough instructions/tutorial videos, there’s bound to be issues that come up. One way to minimize them may be by matching the OS installs on drives to commonly available hardware out there. Something akin to Amazon automotive “it will fit your car” matching.

As I said, most of the people who would be in the target audience for this age highly unlikely to have separate storage drives. These are the people who go to Costco or Staples and just get the laptop in their price range.

What about this as on alternative:

Instead of trying to make people install an OS or have to buy a new machine with Linux pre installed, just sell NVME drives with a Linux distro. Something like Mint, or Ubuntu. In my experience Linux is really good nowadays in recognizing hardware plus the people who would be the target audience are unlikely to have some exotic PC setup, probably just a standard off-the-shelf laptop with very common components.

within 6 months running it as a desktop OS with KDE it broke twice during update to the point that it was easier to reinstall than to fix. it maybe better a a barebones setup, but as a desktop, I had issues with it.

I think it was Slackware sometime in the early 2000s

PREACH!!

I’m not sure where did you get an idea that I was complaining about something. I’ve been running Linux for over 15 years. I know how to maintain my system. I was simply saying that I found a distro that’s better FOR ME than the one I was using.

It the breakage happens, hopefully Timeshift will save me. That’s the best thing that I learned while running EndeavourOS.

I am finding that out too. much better than Manjaro’s repos.

While I don’t have much in a way of hard data, it feels much snappier. Also, it seems to utilize less ram. I believe the difference lies in the Cachy’s repo. A lot of the apps I use daily are not installable from Manjaro repos and so I had to use flatpaks and AppImages. AUR was also a hit or miss for me. Catchy, on the other hand had most of the apps I use in it’s repo. Things like Tutanota desktop client and Zen browser as an example.

Manjaro, because Arch-based, rolling release, but with a dev test cycle to try to eliminate breaking patches.

totally this!!! Most users just need a browser and an email client at best. They couldn’t care less about the OS that’s sitting on top of. If they could go to a store and see a $1000 laptop with Windows and $800 laptop with Linux being sold side by side, majority would pick the cheaper one if they could still get online with it.

There are plenty of ways to configure Linux to circumvent sudo. I’ve even seen people who log in as root by default. I do not, however, advise anyone to do that even if it’s just, as you put it, a Molly Guard. It has prevented me personally from doing catastrophic things to my system on a number of occasions.

This would literally render sudo utterly useless. Sudo is meant to require password to accomplish admin tasks. In your scenario anyone using your computer can do anything without knowing the password.

I suggest setting up Timeshift so it can backup your drive daily and keep several days worth. This way when you or an update screws up your system, you can simply restore to the last working version.

Have you tried Waterfox? It satisfies most of your requirements, I believe.

I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade and distro hopped quite a bit. Mint used to be my happy place, but recently within the last 5 years or so I’ve been on Arch derivatives. Endeavour was never stable enough for my liking, but Manjaro has been great. I did have to go back to a snapshot once, fairly recently, but that was primary because I fecked it up and not due to an update.

You mentioned that you have tried several Arch-based distros, so I’m not sure if this includes Manjaro.