Inspired by the posts here, I’ve recently tried to set up a garage electronics workstation, and part of that involves setting up a PC. Inspired by the posts here, I pulled out my old laptop and stuck Debian on it. The good news: Debian runs fine on Mate, and all the hardware which matters works properly. The bad news: The laptop not only screams like a banshee continually (the age and usage have worn out the fan bearings), but it also has a dual core processor with about a quarter (half the cores at half the IPC) the performance of a Pi 4, and half the RAM at 2gb. Wish me luck everyone.
I’m incredibly biased but you should try putting NixOS on it. With NixOS, you could create a configuration that you’d only have to reason about once then it is set for life. NixOS’s style of config does a lot of great things for reliability too.
I too am incredibly biased ;). I’m a dyed in the wool Debian nut, so I’m basically going to replicate my main setup. The hardest thing is sshing into my home directory of my main PC and moving my configs over. Annoyingly, it seems the computer is too old for Wayland, so Sway won’t work. I think I’m happy with Mate.