It works with a usb bluray drive. Though I got an internal bluray drive for my PC

MakeMKV to backup the contents and if you need it in a different format Handbrake so it can be converted to MP4.

A $50 used ipad is always a better deal than a $80 fire tablet

What I did was I went to the thrift store and I found a laptop. It was the Asus Transformer Book T100han.

I had one when it was new. It was a POS but hey it worked really well in my use case I was thinking of.

Got it home booted it, has Windows 10 1501 installed on it. Refused the update. (The perfect windows machine does exists)

Updated it to 22h2 bricked it by running out of the limited 32GB of storage.

Said screw it got Linux Mint on a USB installer. Installer crashes. Tries Ubuntu… also crashes. Tries OpenSuse, also crashes. Tries Fedora also crashes.

Turns out the installer requires more than 2GB of ram. Laptop only has 2 and it’s soldered. (The e waste special)

Gets Debian installs it. Gets to desktop, no Bluetooth, no audio, but everything else runs better than I ever saw it. Needs older distro.

Gets Q4OS installs fine, runs as well and audio works. No Bluetooth. My very specific use case requires Bluetooth.

Forces myself to go back to windows. No recovery image. Downloads from MS, can’t create media because my PC is on Linux. Boots into VM, makes installer. Installs Windows. No audio no Bluetooth.

Gets drivers from asus website. Everything works but audio. Calls asus support gets drivers. PC is back to when I got it.

Pair Bluetooth controller, installs auto hotkeys, installs libre office. Best teleprompter I’ve ever used.

Shoves into box until it’s needed again.

Cinnamon for 2 reasons

1. KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar

2. cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.

You loose out on automatic updates and not all packages are easy to build. I am not personally familiar with building Gimp. But I’ve tried to build other projects from GitHub only to get errors I couldn’t decipher.

It’s a skill which not many have.

Debian/Ubuntu/Mint packages are always older and only get updated once everything is stable.

If you are looking for more up to date packages I would recommend using FlatPaks or AppImages since they are usually maintained by the devs and kept up to date.