Actually, it goes to a lot of trouble not to step on the toes of later versions of KDE, and there are people who have them both installed side-by-each without major problems.

-nolisten is an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I’d have to look up the details, as it’s been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.

Gentoo works best for me because I’m a control freak. It lets me tune my system in any way I want, and I don’t mind leaving my computer on while I’m asleep so that it can compile its way through libreoffice, webkit, and a couple of browsers. Plus, based on complaints I hear from people using other distros, Portage beats other package managers in every way except speed.

This doesn’t mean that it’s best for everyone, mind you, just that it’s best for me.

There are no open security bugs against TDE that I’m aware of—if there were, I’d expect them to be fixed in the next release. In my experience, the development team, while not huge, is active and competent.

I’ve been using TDE since a little while after Gentoo sunsetted KDE3, and I’ve had no issues. Just make sure your X server is secure—-nolisten and all that stuff—and don’t try to use Konqueror as a web browser (it remains an excellent file manager), and you should be fine.

Wayland is “more secure” than X in that it makes less LAN contact by default and tries to sandbox programs from one another to an extent, just in case some future browser exploit that can copy random swathes of your screen tries to screenshot your password manager or something. There are no active exploits against a correctly-configured X server at this time that will magically vanish if you switch to Wayland, as far as I’m aware—it’s more future-proofing stuff.

Running a couple of Pis with Gentoo myself right now. It works as well as anything, although unless you’re very patient you’ll want to set up a binary package host (or distcc or something) to take the load off the Pi’s somewhat anemic processor.

One thing to keep in mind about older versions of the nvidia proprietary drivers is that they will only work with specific kernel versions (and specific X versions—not sure about Wayland). Once the driver series your card needs stops being updated, you can’t update your kernel without patching the driver. Assuming you have the skills to patch the driver, or someone who does makes their patches public.

I went through this song-and-dance with a very old laptop that had a card of the NV40 generation as its only GPU (no integrated graphics). Eventually I did install nouveau on it, and used it for several years without any issues.

Trinity Desktop Environment, forked from KDE3.

TDE has this natively under the advanced window settings, so I would expect KDE to have it too.

Or ditch udisks in favour of pmount (or udevil?), which shouldn’t be affected as far as I can tell. That will get you a few months’ grace before a similar problem pops up there.

Based on what I’ve seen, for a DE to gain much traction, you need at least one well-known medium-large distro putting it as a default on some of their install media—MATE is well-represented these days because Mint backed it at a crucial stage in its development. I don’t think Enlightenment ever had that.

Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?

Well, X is still out there with its thin client capabilities intact. There are Wayland-compatible VNC clients and servers, if one isn’t big on X. SPICE is intended for connecting to VMs as servers. RDP if you want to use a Windows box as a server.

For a machine such as the OP describes, it would also be possible to install a tailored distro and software selection into the onboard space and place /home and such on a network drive, although that makes it impossible to take the tablet out of range of the LAN. If the touchscreen doesn’t work under either the Wacom or libinput drivers, it would probably be a waste of time, though.

(Really, 16GB is plenty for the distro itself—if I remove the three kernel source trees, a couple of games, and some FreePascal stuff, my desktop system minus /home would fit in that, and it’s anything but minimalistic.)

Yeah, that’s how I was taught in school in Canada in the 1980s, although no one ever explained why. It always did seem odd.

What’s the output of cat /proc/asound/cards on your system?

The 6.6.x kernel series is LTS and should be fine as a downgrade target (6.7.x not so much so). Unless there’s something specific from the newer kernel versions that you need to drive that system, there shouldn’t be any issues. I’m still on a 6.6-series kernel.

That being said, you could try troubleshooting this from the bottom up rather than the top down.

First, use lspci -v to verify that the device is being correctly identified and associated with a driver.

Next, invoke alsamixer and make sure everything is unmuted and your HD audio controller is the first sound device. The last time I had something like this happen to me, the issue turned out to be that the main soundcard slot was being hijacked by an HDMI audio output that I didn’t want and wasn’t using, and that was somehow muting the sound at the audio jack even when I tried to switch to it. A little mucking around in ALSA-level config files fixed everything.

Provided Fedora has the appropriate packages (and I expect they do), I can’t see why not. But see if there’s any distro-specific documentation on switching first.

Wayland’s nvidia support is improving over time, but although it’s becoming less popular, X11 isn’t likely to be completely deprecated anytime soon—I’d expect any mainstream distro to still at least have it as an option a couple of years from now, to handle corner cases Wayland still doesn’t support.

The last X11 stable version bump on my distro was about a month ago, to 21.1.16, so it isn’t like it’s abandonware or anything.

Wild idea: check the condition of the SDD (presumably) that you’re trying to install to. After all, an installation has two endpoints, and if the target disc is on its last legs and throwing SMART errors, it ain’t gonna be too happy getting written to.

Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it’s been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)

So, Poettering wants to make life difficult for everyone using something other than his precious again by transitioning from the normal standard for IPC to something hardly anyone has ever heard of or uses that’s based on JSON? Seriously? 🤢

Distro best added to the “Power-user distros to avoid” list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).

I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn’t the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn’t appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that’s been broken by automation that didn’t quite work as expected. Anyway, I’d suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.