Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Until recently, I had a basic Pentium PC (E5200 cpu, 2GB RAM, Windows 7) for daily use (downloading, browsing, email, etc). About a year ago, this PC started to show signs of failure (swollen capacitors on motherboard, hard drive errors, freezing, and failed usb ports), so I saved up for a replacement. A few months ago, I purchased an Intel NUC 6CAYH (Celeron J3455). It is a basic unit with no RAM, storage or operating system, so I also purchased 4GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive.
I decided to ditch Windows 7 (which I previously used) for a Linux-based operating system. My distro of choice was KDE Neon OS, mostly because of KDE Connect. I tried a few different KDE-based distros, but they all had too much bloatware, KDE Neon OS was just Ubuntu LTS + KDE, VLC and Firefox, not much else. I could choose my favourite apps.
The first hurdle was installation. With the default UEFI BIOS, Neon OS would fail to install GRUB and crash if internet access was disabled. If internet access was enabled, it would install, then fail to boot! With Legacy Boot enabled, Neon OS installed and booted just fine.
With my previous setup, I used Thunderbird for emails, Firefox for browsing, and uTorrent for downloading. Now I tried the default KDE applications; Kmail and Ktorrent, with little success. Kmail refused to send emails, even with the same settings as Thunderbird, so I installed Thunderbird and solved my email problems. Ktorrent downloads were quite slow, so I installed uTorrent and got back full download speeds. Firefox would use single cpu cores at 100% until I changed it's multithreading setting. Since v57, this seems to be the default setting.
The device did switch off a few times for no apparent reason, but I discovered that my UPS battery had failed, and the numerous power dips we experience was the cause. With a new UPS in place, no more random switching off.
As I no longer need to install/update anti-virus software and endless device drivers, RAM usage is somewhat lower and the system performs well. Change feels good…