eugenia

Yes, very snappy.

I use Photopea on the browser when I need something that the Gimp can't do.

Why wait? There's no need for Windows, unless you're running some super-specialized app. The new versions of Windows already have telemetry and privacy issues, so why just go with minimal security options that MS is selling you? You can do almost everything in Linux just as well, if not better, than Windows does at this point. Start with Linux Mint, which is the most Windows-y distribution and you should be golden.

No, Cinnamon with LMDE it's slower than XFce on Debian. These laptops were slow and some had only 2 GB of ram.

My niece, my mom, and my cousin are using Linux because I gave them my old laptops with Debian in it. They don't know how to do anything with the system (not even update it, I do it for them), but they know how to use a browser, or launch a game. Works fine for them like that.

Unfortunately, Krita's main dev has long covid and in the last year they haven't been working much...

Create a second gmail account when you get there. Many apps that you will need there don't exist in the US app/playstore, so you will need the second account to download them.

Wayland is already old architecture by today's standards. It was designed in 2007 by the same people who did Xorg. Linux should have copied or ported the 2014 compositor version of Android (which is currently the one still used). The license was good for it, and its technology the most advanced (neither MacOS/iOS or Win comes close). But Linux users have allergy on anything coming from Google and so we ended up with Wayland.

That's more of an inkscape replacement than a gimp/photoshop one. It's mostly about vectors, not raster images.

When you say delay, do you mean that the sound starts playing 1-2 seconds later, or that the mouth and the audio aren't synced? If you're meaning the #1, then I have the same problem on Firefox under Debian-Testing (kernel 6.10). No solution to it.

Instead of re-installing, just use a usb ethernet adapter and see if that works. Linux supports most of them, but do some checking regardless online for the most compatible ones. Then update the system, remove that usb adapter, rebot. Now see if the original ethernet works. If still not, then continue using the usb adapter as your main source for networking.

I believe the installer version of Debian uses a newer kernel than the one it installs later, that's why your ethernet worked during installation. Sounds like a borked driver for the specific ethernet adapter and the older kernel. Get a usb-2-ethernet adapter, and retry to update the system, in case you get a newer kernel after updating it.