Can you explain? As a Mint user with really old hardware, I appreciate using the LTS kernel. However, I also appreciate them giving users other options.

If you have new hardware, why wouldn’t you use the Edge ISO?

They have a fairly new version called Edge that ships with a newer kernel (currently 6.5).

What packages are broken? I haven’t run into any.

P.S. I think Snaps are now the fuss, so I still think Mint is Ubuntu with the fuss.

I’m generally in the same boat. I don’t think of Mint’s packages as “old”, but “stable”. I’ve had a few cases where I want the latest features, and there are easy ways to get new versions. Dialing down instability isn’t so easy.

this is a notebook with an Intel Core i5-4278U @ 2.60GHz (2 cores, 4 threads) with 8 GB RAM and installing and upgrading on xubuntu 23.10 was already really, painfully slow.

Have you put an SSD in there, or are you still running on spinning rust? In my experience, even a cheap SSD will make a huge difference.

I wouldn’t recommend installing a distro just to install a different DE. IMHO, you should be fine with cinnamon. I’m using Linux Mint 21.3 with cinnamon on an x201 (Thinkpad released in 2010), though I did up the RAM to the 8GB max. However, if you want XFCE, is there a reason you don’t want to use Linux Mint 21.3 with XFCE? If that’s no good for you, I’d recommend finding a distro that fits most of your needs right out of the box, maybe Peppermint Linux or MX Linux?

I think it’d be helpful to understand why you want a lightweight distro. I’m running Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on a x201 (~13 years old) and am happy with it’s performance. I doubt you’re going to have any issues with any distro with your laptop (as others have pointed out, mainstream Thinkpads are well supported by Linux).

I know I have friends who run beasts of machines but refuse to “waste” resources on niceties like animations and whatnot. If you’re into that, I assume you want to optimize and tinker, that’s different that lightweight.

YotoPhone. They also made a version 2 & 3. Unfortunately, Yota went bankrupt.

No sure if this is a serious question, but .btw is not a TLD while .fyi is.

Just because the software is open source doesn’t means a product running it is going to be free. Heck, even some FOSS projects have financial contributors who get perks like software support, access to pre-released software, and input into feature development.

Also why. The. Hell. Are. People. Still. Using. Virtualbox? What is this? 2005? You’re already running a kernel with built in world tier type 1 virtualization.

Honestly, for me, it’s probably just momentum at this point. I’ve been using Virtualbox for at least 15, maybe 20 years now. I don’t use it much anymore with how good docker, etc. have become. Any recommendation on what I should be using instead?

Can it? Certainly. People have been doing so for years now.

Should you? None of us can answer that for you. None of us know your needs, your technical proficiency, or your willingness to put up with bugs/quirks

If you’re interested, you should go read/listen/watch the experiences of users and ask questions once you have some specific ones.

You can setup unattended-updates to handle most of those.

I’m mainly concerned about:

1. Not losing data if one drive dies on me.

Sure, that’s what RAID is designed to do. However, I’d suggest also looking into what happens when your array is degraded and how to rebuild it.

2. Fast reads

I’m a bit surprised you need fast reads with a media server. You’re probably going to have to clarify your needs a bit more.

3. Easy plug and play expansion

Since I’ll have 8 drives (or 6, if I use the smaller server, it would be nice if I could swap out one of them without losing data and add a larger one, which would then get used automatically. Is that something that RAID is good for?

Standard RAID levels generally don’t have options to add larger drives. I’m not sure what you mean by “plug and play”. I’m pretty sure almost all setups will involve a fair bit of configuration.

I’m hesitant to set up backups because it’s going to be a lot of data.

It’s also a lot of data to lose if things go more wrong than you expected (multi-drive failure, bit-rot, etc.).

Is HBA mode that rare? It seems pretty common. Either way, we don’t know OP’s hardware.

And I’m not scared of RAID controller failure, I’m scared of single point failure. I know it’s highly unlikely, but the risk for stranded data is unacceptable IMHO unless you’re recommending OP make sure they have a spare on hand.

Also, I never even mentioned ZFS (I’ve actually never even used it).

It’s sounds like what you’re looking for is backup, and RAID is not backup, it’s redundancy to maintain uptime (as well as data integrity, and in some cases performance). I’d highly recommend you look into backup options, with best case being a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

To be fair, I’m being a little hypocritical. I’ve been working on my backup strategy for years and still don’t have any remote backups yet. Personally, I have a JBOD system, with 8 drives ranging from 2TB to 8TB, so my setup might be a bit complicated for your purposes. I’m not worried about uptime, and am focused on data integrity. I’m not using actual RAID because in the case of a catastrophic failure, I don’t want to lose all my data. I use snapRAID to create some redundancy, and I pool my data drives using mergerfs.

If you are still interested in RAID, I would recommend staying away from hardware RAID as I’ve commented in other places of this post. It has it’s place in data centres but really doesn’t make sense for consumers anymore. There is a lot of good advice in the rest of the comments about RAID, so I’ll summarize my thoughts. If you only plan on having 2 drives, RAID 1 is a good option, though it’s generally used for it’s write performance and that’s probably not necessary on a media server. My current server is running on decade old, lower-end, consumer hardware, and even in that extreme case, media sometimes takes a second to start 1080p content remotely. If you want to add drives and are willing to expand in redundant pairs, you you can either add another RAID layer (RAID 1+0), or pool the partitions together. If you want to be able to expand by single drives/have more than 50% of your potential storage be realized, you could look at RAID 5/6 or ZFS/btrfs. Note that for RAID 5/6, drives need to be equal size.

Yes, but they’re using it in a consumer setting. That was the whole point of my comment. It sounds like they may have 2 identical RAID controllers, which means they might have a spare. However, if one dies, they’d be looking at obtaining another spare, migrating their data to a new setup, or risking complete data loss.

You’re right, hardware RAID still has some use for businesses, but it’s generally a bad idea for consumers. The main reason is the procedure if the RAID controller fails. In commercial applications they have spare, compatible controllers, so a quick hardware swap and you’re back up and running, you don’t even need to rebuild the array. However, consumers generally don’t have a spare controller, and if they don’t, they can’t just get any controller, they need a compatible one or the array is lost. If a system running a software RAID has a hardware failure, the array can be moved to a new host and mdadm can rebuild the array without needing specific hardware.

You really can’t compare any other country to the Great Firewall of China.