Also with a "real OS" the PC would not be necessarily wasted as a mail-only device. Have vlc and xpdf at least (need to install alsa-base alsa-utils and alsamixergui too) so now the PC can at least play CD, DVD, video and music from USB without jack all a chance of infection. I like the deadbeef audio player too if people can be assed to use it and make playlists.

Yay for LXDE, and debian has similar qualities for being relatively simple, well known and understood.
Comes with Firefox ESR by default (iceweasel) which is better suited as a less often updated browser than the regular one.. though the situation might be so dire you should maybe use lynx and dillo.

I don't use mail clients but I would think of trying claws-mail first (hell my main webmail, a very major and well known one always had doing that as a pay option I believe, though there are wrappers/plugins/scripts for mail clients to download the mail anyway)

Which is not that far from what the US does with its social programs. US would be a socialist country if not for the huge leech that is the healthcare industry and other vampires preying on the US people (prison-security complex, etc.)

In particular, Africa is much bigger than we usually think. Mercator projection maps shrink it relatively to Europe and other northern lands, while a Gall-Peters map makes it quite huger than Europe or N. or S. America

This sounds like it was easy, compared to how it should have been. No need to learn BSD, afterall? (nor a "pro" distro like Red Hat / CentOS which I guess would be about the same work, moving from Ubuntu)
plus a standard tower case still is the easiest system to work on, including for getting hard drives in and out of it.

I remember shortly after 911 jokes about saying "bomb", "osama" and whatever on the phone and then be tracked/recorded. The general media was often mentioning the Echelon network back then, with photographs of a masked antenna farm and some info about who runs them (US, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ).
Since then 8 core pentiums have replaced one core sparcs, 1TB SATA hard disks replaced 10GB SCSI disks, GbaseT replaced 10baseT etc. and the mass media devolved into more of a "social media" echo chamber (that replaced the "blogosphere" in stupid journalists's minds)

So what has changed really?

Even the war lies issues (known before the actual 2003 invasion, not discovered after Snowden leaks) has not changed much in the conduct of US and European powers. No, those countries who opposed invasion are now on-board and they wage "humanitarian" wars to clean up after other failed "humanitarian" wars in the same areas.

On the other hand, a XP desktop can be actually fast without needing an SSD.

The only trouble is that in 8.0, the search by typing letter doesn't find Windows Update and that is precisely what I use the typing search feature for.
I found out that there's Windows Update as a control panel item in Windows 7/8, and learned to change the control panel display from "categories" to "icons", so fortunately I can at least hit win+r, enter "control" and then find Windows Update from there.

oh yes, multiple desktops are needed. I remember I believed that Vista would come with them, just because it seemed an obvious feature to have. I was then pretty displeased to see them missing.

Maybe not really locale-related, but there's a really shitty issues with games on linux (moreso native ones that those on Wine, maybe). Most tend to assume you have a qwerty keyboard, e.g. they rely on WASD to move but I need ZQSD. Such stuff can be remedied with the chore of shifting some key input definitions in the game options, but sometimes I'm stuck, e.g. unable to switch to the melee weapon in Open Arena, or to open the console (but shift + that upper left key above TAB might be able to open the console if you know about it).

In the DOS/Windows world you always had qwerty games, but they would read the keyboard "raw" so no problem, keyboard behaves as if you really had a qwerty one. In Linux to play qwerty games I need to create a script that does setxkbmap us, launches the game, setkxbmap fr, and then create a desktop shortcut (which I think sucks) or a bash alias (nice, but you don't get to see a graphical list of games and their icons)

So.. I think I'd need a daemon that changes keyboard layout on the fly when I'm inputting to a qwerty game.

I had the same problem with Steam : Counter Strike's radio voices were in French, and I happen to find them horrendous, not suited to the game , wrong tone etc. (and in fact they were a pack made by an amateur before then!, when HL/CS were non-Steam). To get the english voices you needed to set the entire Steam in English, which would download all English content for the other games (at least when you launch them), so Half-Life was now in English instead of French and significant amount of audio data was downloaded.

Many years later (after a long period of not using Steam) I found out they got that fixed and now you can have a language setting per game.

So blivet and parted have totally different missions, I guess?

*I don't know the fuck what's so different between fdisk and parted, besides support for newer stuff like GTP partition tables.

Those CPU power states the operating system uses are provided by the CPU, and the supporting chipset and power circuitry on the motherboard do determine the power use at idle too. E.g. Haswell CPU have significantly lower idle power use than Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge, and introduce another idle power state on top of that.

Good hardware reviews sites do tell you about that. Likewise if you use a dedicated graphics card : e.g. Radeon 4870 wastes a shit ton of power even when you use it as a dummy 2D buffer (idling on the desktop in Vista/7 Basic or a 2D linux desktop) while Radeon HD 7000 or 6000 and up uses a handful of watts for that.

I don't think you realize the performance level of a latest Intel dual core CPU that scales between 1.0 and 2.6GHz. It's fucking good enough. Better than Pentium 4, Atom and slightly old ARM, which is what people often are actually using. If you're doing video encoding or RAW photo importing and don't give a fuck whether it takes 5 or 15 minutes, one or two hours.. Good enough, can use AVX/AVX2 for that and you can still use the computer while background processing is occuring anyway.

UEFI can be a detriment.. in that I failed to get Windows 7 to dual boot/multiboot with linux on an Asrock FM2+ mobo. Windows refused to install at all after some many tries (though I didn't try to destroy and recreate the whole partition table). So the machine ended up linux only.