Windows -> Ubuntu 10.04 … 11.10, -> Kubuntu 12.04 -> Debian 7 (stable)… 8 (testing… stable) … 12

Yes, usual releases are supported ~ 3 months, LTS versions get support for a much longer period e.g. 6.6 for 3 y, 6.1 for 4 y, 5.15 for 5 y or 5.10 for 6 y.

Two different things. LTS kernels get security patches until their support is dropped.

Yes, but if e.g. openSuSE installs its Grub 2 on top of Ubuntu’s Grub 2, you end up with a different theming. If Windows overwrites the bootloader, the Linux boot options are gone.

No, but somebody else has done it and it is basically like the standard procedure for switching between releases.

It ain’t much, but it’s honest work.

3. There’s a Dropbox .deb and .rpm for linux as far as I can tell, but I cannot attest to its quality or how well it integrates with a given file manager. Cloud accounts are generally well supported amongst the key desktop environments, for which I’d consider Cinnamon to be a part of.

In 2018 Dropbox dropped support for running/syncing on encrypted partitions, in my case ext4 on encfs. Don’t ask me why.

I don’t know if that’s still the case.

If you are using Xubuntu 22.04, it should be possible to switch without reinstallation, as Linux Mint and Ubuntu are binary compatible as Mint uses Ubuntu’s repos and only adds Mint-specific packages in its own repo.

As there are LTS branches, currently 5.4, 5.10, 5.15, 6.1 and 6.6 which will get updates until Decembre 2025/2026, I don’t see the problem.

I guess, the governor is set to performance for a realtime kernel to work properly, thus the CPU consumes more power.

Don’t be scared if this leads to uninstallation of a meta-package.

Then, as I said, removing libgtk2 and libgtk3, specifically, the corresponding packages containing these libraries, should trigger removing everything GNOME/GTK related.

I suppose Fedora works similar to Debian handling dependencies, thus uninstalling libgtk* should trigger removing all GNOME/GTK packages and apps. Removing a metapackage, like it’s probably gnome-desktop, usually does almost nothing.

Edit: You can reinstall the GTK apps you like to use, e.g. Firefox or LibreOffice, later, as the user config files are not going to be deleted.

Edit 2: Maybe I’ve misunderstood: Do you want to keep the GNOME login session an desktop environment but use KDE apps like Kate instead of gedit?

However, with some effort, you can install Linux and turn them into regular laptops.

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Error 127 is “command not found”.

Here, at the end of the reply, the solution was to rename the postinst-file of the package and go on with apt update and dpkg --configure -a.

I’ve sometimes encountered error 1 when the extraction failed because the downloaded deb-archive was corrupted. Deleting the corresponding deb-file in /var/cache/apt helped in my case.

I said the change from 7 to 10 was much bigger (and yes, we’re ignoring vista completely).

Do you mean Windows 8/8.1 instead of Vista, as 8 was between 7 and 10?

Skimming though the LibreOffice 24.2 release notes, this was the first thing I’ve encountered:

New line break algorithm for interoperability

Since 2013, the non-proprietary, metric-compatible alternative fonts are no longer guaranteed the same paragraph layout, because MS Word 2013 and later introduced a new default line breaking algorithm for justified text. To fix the lost interoperability, the same algorithm has been implemented in Writer to reduce spaces within justified lines by up to 20%. tdf#119908 blog post (László Németh, donor: NLnet).

And in 24.8:

Fixed an issue with shape positioning in DOCX import for RTL paragraphs (Miklos Vajna, Collabora) tdf#160833

As it is nice opening a document and having the line breaks and figures at the intended places, it can be concluded that there is noticeably development going on for compatibility between LO Writer and MS Word.

Windows 10 coming to EOL

This has never mattered. Most people just switch or buy next Windows version.

Or keep on using Windows 10 and are happy not to be annoyed by updates any more.