Gaming has nothing to do with Linux. I wish that we could just move on from that. It isn’t the fault of Linux or anyone in the community that some companies choose to ban from you to running there software. Market share is unlikely to cause major changes.
Honestly Linux market share doesn’t matter much.
With that being said Linux can be used however you see fit as long as you aren’t violating licensing
You can run Waydroid for android app support. I’m not really sure I understand what you are saying. “Big name” proprietary software will never come to Linux as there is no incentive for companies to spend money on that. You technically can run pretty much any Android app on Linux but that’s a privacy nightmare
Distro doesn’t really matter. Most of it is the same.
Linux works fine on most laptops so I’m not sure where that came from. I will point out that a old laptop is probably going to be a clunky experience due to the bad battery life and failing touchpad.
The thing you need to realize about Linux is that it is highly modular. Each layer depends on the layers below it down to the hardware. If a upper layer starts having issues there is a good chance the problem lower in the system. I don’t really have much context to why you couldn’t put a file in a folder but my guess is that the application didn’t have permission to access that folder. These days the modern desktops have a way to auto escalate permissions but that’s a fairly new thing.
The reason most people don’t like snaps is fairly complicated. It started with Ubuntu forcing some basic packages to install as a snap instead of a native package. The thing is snaps are not native packages and because of this it caused major problems. These days a lot of the issues have been addressed but there are still some serious design flaws. The biggest issue is that it is way overly complex and depends on a privileged daemon. The result of this is poor performance and a clunky experience.
Are you on Linux Mint? If so it has a application for installing and removing packages.
What do you like about Android
I think it would be cool to see Flatpak enter the server space.
Linux doesn’t really have stand alone programs like Windows. A package is a series of files that get placed in the proper places plus some optional scripting. Packages have dependencies so you can’t just run a binary from a package. The closest thing Linux as is AppImage but it lost a lot of steam.
In Linux there are two general types of package managers. The first one is native packages. Native packages install to the root filesystem and are part if the core system.
The second type of package manager is the portable format like Flatpak. Flatpaks can either be installed system wide or as a local user. The big difference is that they run in there own environment and have limited permissions. This is done by creating a sandbox that has its own filesystem so that it is independent of the system. This is also what makes them portable as that environment is the same no matter what.
Technically snap packages are portable but you aren’t going to see much use outside of Ubuntu since the underlying architecture has so many flaws.
You could use the GUI
You don’t need anything special. Just dd the old drive to the new drive and then expand the partitions.
I wouldn’t recommend jumping into Ubuntu or Debian.
Just a few things I would like to add.
First, switch to Libreoffice when you can as OpenOffice is not being maintained all that well. As far as Linux goes I see know reason you should force yourself into it. Windows 11 is not that bad and I get the impression you want things to be the Windows way. Linux has gotten significantly better but it sounds like you want a Windows clone which is not possible. Linux will never be a drop in replacement for Windows especially if you need perfect compatibility. I will note that your lag issue is probably tied to YouTube defecting Firefox and throttling the connection.
With that being said, if you are serious about switching I would get a separate computer to use and learn on. Your workflow will need to shift so it is better to have a separate device to play with. You can pickup a old business machine for around $100. (Or possibly free if you to a junk yard)
Syncthing is entirely the wrong thing to use.
Anyway what you are describing is possible but it will take some work. I think it is likely not worth the effort. However, I’ll leave that up to you.
To do what you are describing you need to first have a way to send data back and forth between devices and then a way to shutdown and start containers.
To do this I would use Ansible. To start you are going to need to setup an Ansible service user on the server. Makes sure that it is configured so that it can run sudo without a password and is in the docker group. Once you have the service user you need to add it to the hosts file on your desktop.
Next, create two different playbooks. The first playbook will be the one that pulls the container over. First have it connect to the server and stop the container. Then have it run rsync to pull the data down to your local machine. Once the data is pulled have it start the container on your machine.
For the second playbook have it first stop the container on your desktop and then rsync the data over. Once the data is synced have it bring up the container on the server.
For safety you probably should add some check to make sure that you don’t mistakenly run the wrong playbook. You should add a check to make sure that the container is really running where it is expected. It is pretty easy to have Ansible run a check.
You technically could do this will pure scripting but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Ansible plugins:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/docker/docker_compose_module.html
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/posix/synchronize_module.html
I don’t know what you are trying to say. (Your sentence is a run on)
Are you sure about the power usage part? They both have a TDP of about 60W.
So what was the question? It sounds like you already decided.
The biggest difference between these 2 chips is how they scale. The i7-6700k is faster but it has less cores. The E5-2620 has more cores but the clock speed and memory are much slower.
What do you mean?
I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
But even if it did, do you seriously think legacy companies would want to support it? Linux encourages knowledge, tinkering and vendor independence which is not what these companies want. They want a locked down platform that keeps the companies safe.