You’re not a journalist

from reading, don’t believe you (oxjox) happen to even know who CriticalResist8 is let alone who he works for or anything else and that what you want to spread as truth about him (her?) really only is your weak personal shortthought quick-response-cause-i-can-insult-someone opinion. But of course i do not “know” if that is true about you even though i happen to believe that now. how could i know?

i didn’t think CR8 was a journalist either, but i wouldn’t state that i knew he wasn’t until i actually know that as a fact. Do you know that as a fact? Did you check his identity, papers or such?

There are appropriate places for your work. This is not the place.

please, oxjox, do not spread untrue informations or unproven guesses as truth about other people here, lemmy is not a place for such or any type of insults. thank you for not doing such again !!

… that phrase “formed on stolen land” … to who reminds me that again?

maybe try to find a linux user group near where you live. if there is one, usually you get help there, but its usually kinda different sort of help, you don’t get “the solution” to get your personal whishes come true ready prepared in bite-sized piezes for easy consumption but just the help by advices or suggestions that those there can give you or directly would try out.

open source is about sharing knowledge and todays mainstream OS distributions are way more complicated than long ago so the learning curve to adjust things in ways the distribution didn’t prepare (which is often a lot) might be high but always worth a try at least for the learning.

for a lightweight desktop environment that is somehow similar to the old windows98, i’ld say give XFCE a try. i think on debian/ubuntu trying out could be as easy as installing the xfce (or xfce4?) package (or maybe an xfce4-desktop-environment paclage) i don’t remember the exact package name but there is one meta package that depends on all needed stuff, i did it like 4 years ago… when installed you could try it by logging in and (your distro should have a login manager that allows this, or you’ld have to change that too) choosing xfce as desktop environment at login time, thus if you don’t like it, logout again and login with the other again.

i am using xfce because it is clean, lightweight, it does its job, does not invent new unneeded features every few month (like it felt when i used kde long ago) and is adjustable enough for me. i removed the lower task bar and put the open windows components into the bar above adjustedbthat a bit, thats basically what i changed and i think it is quite similar to what win98 was (but thats not the reason for me to have it that way)

also, it is possible to change the window manager (that handles how windows are placed), the desktop manager (like task bar, application menu, maybe widges, logout buttons) and of course also one could change x.org to wayland and back without changing the other components. the login window could come from gnome project but after login one could use a complete different projects toolset.

“can” does not mean that every distro makes that an easy task. also mixing things will likely end in a fuller disk for lots of “needed” components that are maybe mostly unused. (i think i once used gnome but installed kde only for their printing dialog *lol)

when using the big distributions it is likely that no 3rd party downloads are needed to try other window managers or desktop environments, maybe search for such keywords in aptitude , apt search, or such. but new fancy stuff also often first comes from unknown 3rd party websites (or git*.com which is the same security risk as 3rd party websites) before it gets into main repositories after years (or maybe even never)

Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. […] and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

maybe “TwisterOS” tries to invent air movement by software? it might be a random unrelated incident and the fan is simply broken, it might also be that it enabled some fan control and the fan would start if you only heat up the system enough which might not happen with a lightweight distro and the maybe not cpu consuming programs you use (?). “stress” is a program that could artificially create such cpu consumption for testing (but with a broken fan it might be not a good idea to actively and unnecesarily heat up the cpu, but also cpus usually have failsafe shutdown mechanisms so they dont overheat but that might be like a sudden power down so maybe expect unsaved work to just vanish) another test could be to just give the fan another power source and see what happens, and put abother fan that works in place to see if that changes something

You can use

also there is:

./configure && make && make install

just to mention ;-)

the OS was not the comparison, but the hardware it runs on (just as @Freefall said) but also you seem to be wrong with your other assumption:

And both those devices are tied to a specific OS.

Which seems not to be the case as install instructions for another OS can be found here (i didn’t try it though) for the mentioned device:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/pdx215/

lineage os still is an “android”, but another vendor with clearly different approach than the original firmware and what hinders you from writing bsd drivers and compiling a bsd kernel for it instead? So i count the Xperia 1 III as NOT bound to any OS or OS vendor.

But despite the way longer possible support/security, freedom of choice and endless other possibilities that often come along with free OS choice, this pure and great advantages weren’t even mentioned there, thus it wasnt an OS comparison as it also wasn’t a bound-to-an-OS vs. absentness of vendor-lock-in-limitation-jungle comparison.