Linux or Windows?

As for your questions:

• this CPU will be fine for years for absolutely everything except AAA gaming.
• On Linux, 16Gbs of RAM is fine. As other said, prefer 2x8Gb instead of a single 16Gb.
• 250Gb of storage is very cramped by modern standards. I would go at least 512Gb. Buy your SSD from elsewhere, it’s much cheaper.
• maybe grab an extra USB-C in case you need to plug an external drive while charging your PC.

Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.

Once you’re spending more than $2,000 on a 5-pound laptop, most people would be better off buying multiple computers—an inexpensive thin-and-light laptop for battery life and portability, plus a good midrange desktop for performance and comfort.

Does this guy live in the real world? This sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not.

Double your e-waste with this one simple trick 👍

I think you can reasonably double that figure, the 20W CPU power consumption quoted are an average during benchmarking, not real world use. My current laptop with a much less efficient 8th gen Core i7 is currently sitting at around 7-9W in Gnome’s “power saving” profile, while using 9-13W in “balanced” profile (total power consumption as seen by the battery, not just the CPU).

It’s like scrolling on your phone, where the content on your screen follows exactly your fingers movements. On Wayland you can do the same with a trackpad, like for example when scrolling, switching workspaces or invoking the activities overview. It feels much nicer, more immediate and more natural than on X.org, where gestures are just triggering a shortcut after a set distance.

May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more “mainstream” ones?

Puppy Linux’s main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn’t need to be installed to run. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.

Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most “universal” documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.

Thanks for this great writeup about what makes Ubuntu its own thing rather than standard.

I’ve updated my post with “I heard conflicting stuff over the Internet and now I’m scared” and an introduction. Those are legitimate questions for people who, like me, do a lot of research before committing to something. Some of the discussions here and in other communities might scare people off, as they might feel they’ve done the “wrong” choice or are afraid to do the “wrong” choice.

So… Fedora + Distrobox ?