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I found a beautiful alternative to MusicBee (audio manager & player)!
Link: https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/
For podcasts and radio, you'll need another program. But this is the closest any player has come to the Windows-only MusicBee masterpiece. Via Wine, I've been using MusicBee since I switched to Linux a few months ago, but it was tedious to set up.
Tauon Music Box has the best search I've ever seen, just type anywhere and start playback with left click or jump to song/artist/album with right click. It also has a great way to write filter and sort queries for custom libraries (the same as playlists here). F5 shows the current cover and song name in "fullscreen" with a frequency spectrum visualizer.
Screenshots from my library with custom settings:
I also consider using it to play my audiobooks, because you can separate playlists to scan separate folders and not get music and audiobooks mixed.
Which DE for my parent's laptop (old Lenovo IdeaPad)? Wayland or X11?
I chose Debian 12 as a solid and stable base. Which of these shipped DEs is the best for this particular laptop series and Windows 10 like user experience?
GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Xfce 4.18
Don't know the exact laptop model and year, but here are some specs: IdeaPad, only HDD, DVD drive, shipped with Win 8 or 10 (I think), unbearably slow on Win 10 currently
Use case: office, web, movies (not streaming), things for non-tech-savvy users
Personally, I'm using Arch btw with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, so I would prefer this over other DEs, but Debian still ships version 5. Has anyone experience with performance on an old Lenovo laptop with any of the listed environments?
Advice on switching from Kubuntu to EndeavourOS?
I tested it a bit in a VM to get familiar with pacman and yay. Latest KDE Plasma 6 and more snaps in Ubuntu's future are the main reasons I want to switch.
As I don't use a separate home partition, I have an extra drive with BackInTime home dir backups and virtnbdbackup snapshots.
Is EndeavourOS stable enough for everyday use and would restoring home with BackInTime just work (as root user)?