fuck Ubuntu. no, we will not explain ourselves.

anyway.

we have a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop that used to run Windows 7, but that broke. assuming it's a software error so this is possible, we would like to:

- boot it from a thumbdrive and copy the contents of the hard drive to our latest backup drive, and
- reformat ext4 and install a Linux on it.

we could use an install media for our current distro, NixOS, but (a) shit's been going down in that scene and we don't know the status of anything and (b) being Linux novices, we kinda want to take advantage of having another computer to try some other distribution.

things we would like from a new distro, in no particular order:

- timely security updates for Firefox
- choice of Gnome or Plasma desktop (currently using Plasma, curious about Gnome)
- a dev community with a healthy code of conduct
- relatively easy maintenance
- not based on Ubuntu

this seems like a weirdly hard list of criteria to meet, but if anyone has suggestions, we'd appreciate.