JAdsel

Yep. (Though I’m going through Chaotic-AUR rather than Mullvad’s own repo.) It does get a little annoying, but hey.

This is using a combo of a phone running GrapheneOS, and Linux on desktop. It’s an ongoing process.

1. Infomaniak KMail for anything that matters. I do still have a couple of Gmail accounts, and have continued to use one of them to give out publicly and catch spam. FairEmail as a mobile client for them all. Infomaniak’s webmail is decent, and I just use it on desktop.
2. Infomaniak KDrive / just physical backups. Considering self-hosting Nextcloud for some of it. KDE Connect helps with syncing across devices.
3. OsmAnd~ / OpenStreetMap where practical. I do occasionally resort to Google Maps on an old Android phone for navigation.
4. Mostly been using my distros instance of SearX on desktop, DuckDuckGo elsewhere.
5. Firefox still on mobile / preferably FireDragon on desktop / Vanadium is also good on mobile, but I missed the easy cross-device syncing.
6. Strictly local data Fossify Calendar on mobile, importing and sending .ics events as need be.
7. Don’t really have a need for contacts management outside of phone contacts and e-mail.
8. My own ad hoc ADHD Brain workaround setup that probably wouldn’t transfer well. Quillpad looks good on mobile though, with Nextcloud sync to take it across platforms.
9. LibreOffice whenever I do need anything like that these days, with KDrive sharing as required.
10. Matrix. Using a public homeserver that runs a bridge to Google Chat (among other services), with my partner still using GChat exclusively.
11. Rarely comes up, but probably also Matrix with the bridges.
12. Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, besides obviously Lemmy. I don’t really do social media these days.
13. Spotify. Prefer downloading/ripping and keeping MP3s locally.
14. Mainly still YouTube, but through Revanced where possible. One of the biggest gaps in other viable services right now.
15. AuthPass cross platform. Using the same format as KeePass, but I prefer their client.
16. Mullvad /AdGuard DNS on my phone, Cloudflare on desktop / Whatever my partner currently has set up on the network now plus my own firewalld configuration at home
17. Mostly stock GrapheneOS
18. F-Droid / Aurora / (Sandboxed) Play Store only where the others won’t do it.
19. Still need to get the archive away from Google. Considering just organizing locally with Immich, just doing local backups for a couple years now.
20. DMI / Vädret apps (more useful locally), KDE’s built-in weather widget on desktop.
21. We avoid “smart” anything in this house. The closest is Xiaomi’s (Graphene sandboxes) app handling the robovac.
22. It’s not Google specific, but I have personally been leaning toward FOSS software storing data locally wherever I reasonably can.

Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.

Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.

NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA’s repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

That’s what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It’s aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you’re not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn’t really matter. That’s mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

I’m also in the Nordics (so accustomed to the overall electronics prices by now), and going to echo that their prices are looking kinda steep for what you’re getting. Unless you’re somehow extremely uncomfortable with picking up a refurb machine somewhere else, and installing whichever distro(s) you want on it yourself. That should be a simple enough process, maybe especially dealing with a Lenovo–and really on just about any laptop you can find, as compared to 20 years ago. Or probably even the 10 since you were last using it.

Just getting a refurb elsewhere and making an install USB is the way I would suggest going. If you use Ventoy to write it, you should be able to try several different live system options off the same stick before deciding which to go with for now.

That site did not seem to be actually specifying what distro they’re installing for you, but their “Linux installation” service page (for the equivalent of $150US or €130+!) shows Mint and offers the option of several desktop flavors of Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. If you’re happy to pay that kind of premium for someone else to spend maybe 15 minutes on likely a Mint install set up however they decided was best? Sure, it might be a decent way to go. Doesn’t really seem necessary even for a complete beginner, however.