I’ve literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.

AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.

I don’t think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.

I can’t really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.

XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I’m sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.

I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.

How so? I have never found installing yay difficult, and using it is essentially the same as pacman with the addition of aur packages. What issues have you run into?

ClamAV

But on a serious note, no, I have no idea why that would happen.

Linux Mint. Easy to set up, reasonably easy to use, and used by enough people that a quick internet search should probably turn up results of people who have run into similar issues if you ever have a problem.

I second @Hellmo_Luciferrari@lemm.ee 's suggestion of Arch/KDE. I cannot think of a time when I have had to go outside of pacman/yay or setup a custom repo. I don’t use them personally, but the AUR even has -git versions of many packages if I needed to have the absolutely down-to-the-minute latest version of something, but even the official repos are rarely far behind in my experience. Fractional scaling seems to work fine on my 2560x1600 display. VScodium works fine when I tested it, but I do not use it regularly enough to really have a strong opinion on it.

That is a lot of RAM. Only a quad-core processor, but I imagine should still be fine for general-purpose desktop use.

What would you want it to do? Honestly I would call that over-specced for something like a file server and would probably consume a lot of power if left on all the time. Maybe a media server which can use the discrete GPU for video encoding?

No problem! Yeah, as long as you have the space, I think this would be a good way to repurpose an old junker PC. I imagine a quick search of something along the lines of “how to configure a samba server” should bring up some decent tutorials.

I use an older HP thin client PC with a 4TB solid state drive as an SFTP file server using vsftpd, but if you are local only then an SMB server using samba would probably be fine. I use SFTP because I wanted something a bit more secure which I can port-forward with my router on a random higher-numbered port for remote access.

I mostly taught myself how to do this by looking at guides originally meant for the raspberry pi, but there is nothing different about running these same programs on Debian or the like. Personally, I would not recommend a raspbery pi for a large file server, as they do not natively support SSDs without additional hardware which will make the price significantly higher and less self-contained than a used, older-gen thin-client PC which can be had for relatively low cost on places like ebay (though they do make some fairly high capacity micro SD cards these days).

Hardware-wise, generally these types of servers are not CPU intensive, nor do they require any particularly high amount of RAM, so an older-gen or lower power CPU can often work fine, but you should probably make sure to get something with at least gigabit ethernet speeds, as a 100Mbit connection on, say, a raspberry pi 3 or older will be very slow for transferring large files.

I mostly learned from some of the terminal customization which came stock with Manjaro when I was first learning Linux. So when I made the jump to Arch, I customized my terminal with fsh with the powerlevel10k theme and text highlighting. I also modified some of the default text colors to a green color to evoke green phosphor CRT terminals.

A chamomile blend by Tealyra called “Tranquil Nights”