Devils advocate - you might be getting extra layer of testing, by the "derived" distro testing community.
I mean if they do any, it may be more focussed on the combo of setup and software you prefer.
So a small reduction in risk of bugs?

I thnik ubuntu did have a pupose in 2002 or whenever - it was a step foward in ease of install, and out of the box experience, esp. for noobs.
Now most have that, including stock debian. even arch comes with the idspispopd script these days.

also if you "need" the data on SCSI.
2 backups are recommended anyway, but esp before fdisking around with partitions.

haha, that is cool

good cross platforms too.
I've used it from win, osx, linux, android.
It just finds the DLNA and CIFS shares from my nas so naturally in the library - better than thunar.
I just wish my "smart" TV had it.

Yeah, though previously you did have k-lite codec pack, and media player classic (i'm talking win 2k / xp days)

VLC did just dominate though.

because you chose canonical over debian.

give stock debian a try

just go stock debian xfce, keep it simple.

It's what my 70 year old mother is perfectly happy with for several years since I told her to drop lubuntu.

install flatpack +flathub f you want even more app convenience.

in case it's not clear from the comments . and sorry for repeating if it is, but this >> thing is a really useful terminal thing to know in many cases.
>>
will trap and redirect terminal output.

So consider any old commmand and its output:
echo abc

This invokes the echo command and echo outpts "abc" to terminal.

If we add on >> we can catch and redirect the output:

 echo abc >> blah.txt

Will capture the output "abc" into the file.

Note this is an APPEND operation, so run it twice to the same output file and you'll add more and more output to new lines at the end of the same file.

+1 to this.

You can reduce likelihood of any known risk with a preventative measure, in this case the permissions and ownership structure. That is good.

Backup does not reduce likelihood of risk.

It does something more wide-reaching, it mitigates against the bad outcome of loss (from most causes).So it defends from many unknown risks as well as known ones, and unexpected failure of preventative measures. It sort of protects you from your own ignorance and complacency.

Shit - i'm off to do some more work on backup.sh.

yeah I paid a lot for an apple laptop in 2008. (more than the hardware was worth - but the form factor was good)
It was okay, and osx was ok for most stuff for a few years .

But they cut support for updates well within 10 years and the version I was stuck on eventually just got too far behind on security updates and couldn't even get firefox updates and stuff.
So they forced me back tolinux full time - thankfully dual bootng macos+linux was really easy on the old x86 ones.

It seems you have to keep shipping them big buckets of dollars every 5 years or so - fuck that.
I'd much rather just give the odd bit of pay-what-you-can/ tip jar to a few linux projects than chuck out perfectly good hardware every few years.

There's always tinycorelinux for hardcore minimalists.
I can't say about package support either - i've not used it enough, but theres a "dcore" extension that lets you acess debian repos.

I've installed it on a potato easily enough - and I did find it to be astonishing for how small it is.

But I don't use it day to day, or much at all, so i'm not going to endorse it.
It's not necessarily the most user friendly. and some people might cal the gui slightly dated - persnally i did like that.

So this is just make you aware of one of the lightest distros I know of (that is sort of usable out of the box)
Recommended: spec is 128mb ram and pentium2. min spec 46mb ram (maybe thats without the gui desktop environment)

It's possibly a bit lighter than antix - for some reason i never quite got on with either antix or mx - not sure why.

steam deck? I wonder how many full-time staff valve devotes to testing and pushing regular updates.

I think a lot of arch people want the bleeding edge updates, so it seems a lot like to go btrfs or and setup snaphots or something if they want a safety net.