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Never regretted buying PIs myself. A Pi4B is capable of replacing a desktop PC for office use, watching movies or listening to music. Even an old Pi2B can be reused for running 'pi-hole' as a sentinel for blocking ads and tracking by simply plugging it into a spare router port. Sips electricity...

My Pi 4B has Ubuntu Mate installed on a USB SSD and can confirm it's fast enough to run Firefox, Libre Office, VLC etc. I also installed Raspberry PI OS on an SD Card which is also usable but a bit less responsive. Not tried any Microsoft stuff or using it as a router/firewall/VPN but I doubt...

One way is to edit the file: '/etc/default/grub': sudo nano /etc/default/grub then set the line 'GRUB_TIMEOUT=10' to 2 (or less) seconds and save it Remember to type: 'sudo update-grub' afterwards.

Another vote for laser printers. High reliability and minimal running expenses. Most HP and Brother models work perfectly with Linux.

Not like-for-like but it can sometimes be advantageous to have backups and restoration tools totally independent of an installed OS on a bootable USB drive. These tools can be particularly useful with multi-boot systems.

Strange, when testing Redo Rescue there was an error message on the initial boot something about 'loading a kernel first' but this disappeared on second and subsequent boots. Considering the complexity of these tools a one-off initial glitch is of no concern. It's a good tool but rescuezilla has...

Rescuezilla is a fork of Redo Backup and also works well. https://rescuezilla.com/

Probably best to avoid rolling release distros and stick with stable long term support (LTS) releases from Mint, Xubuntu or Ubuntu MATE. To me. Ubuntu itself seems a bit of an odd-ball on the desktop due to its Gnome 'smartphone style' interface.

Used ubuntu-cleaner for years with Xubuntu. Never had any problems with it, it has always worked as expected. Conveniently saves me going though a series of manual command line methods for removing old disused kernels, log files etc.

In Firefox, hold down the CTRL key then use the mouse wheel to increase or decrease text size.

I use one of the commands below as needed with Xubuntu. Need to wait for USB disk to automount before executing and ensure final forward slashes are present. rsync -rtxl --delete --progress /media/<user>/SSD-P2/ /media/<user>/USB-BACKUP1/ rsync -rtxl --delete --progress /media/<user>/SSD-P2/...

With main desktop PC, 'rsync' is used to incrementally backup the files and directories in the data partition to three external 2.5in USB drives (grandfather,father,son). An individually switched USB3.0 hub powers up the appropriate drive at backup time. I've less concern about the OS...

Family members do not use a printer much but occasionally paper cannot be avoided. With inkjets there is always half an hour of unsavory language and wasted ink getting the thing unclogged and ready to use. I used to dread anyone wanting to print anything but since switching to a laser printer...

Try installing the version with 'non-free' firmware included. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

Recent Firefox releases have a PDF editing option built in. Used it successfully a couple of weeks ago to complete and print a couple of forms. Worked well.

android-86 works well in Virtualbox on Linux for running android apps. https://www.android-x86.org/

I've never purchased a smartphone but have played with a few owned by others. They all failed to impress so probably not missing much. I like the sights and sounds of the environment when out and about so happy to defer internet usage until I boot up a PC or laptop at home which I can usually...

I've gone the other way, I've assembled several ATX cased PCs in the past but more recently I can't be bothered researching and sourcing the parts. These days I prefer small format renewed/refurbished desktops, usually ThinkCentres. Running Xubuntu, I find they perform well enough for my usage...

The snap version was slow loading first time. The mozilla ppa version loads fast just like the pre-snap days. Thanks for that info.

I use cheap shared web hosting with unlimited email accounts. Accessed using thunderbird but there is an unused web interface.