If you want stability, you probably can’t beat Debian, and you should be fairly used to the backend by now. I suspect the stylus use is just going to be figuring out what package provided your current access to it.

Before you wipe the laptop, I would recommend finding a command to list all the installed packages, then at least you’ll have a reference to what was in place before. And if possible, maybe grab a backup of the /etc folder (or whatever might still be accessible) so you can reference the current configs on various packages to recreate whatever doesn’t work by default.

There are a number of lightweight desktops you can choose from. I personally like Mate, but maybe you can play around with others on the new system and purge the ones you don’t like. And while you’re swapping drives, check the memory slots, maybe you can drop another 8GB stick in there to give the whole system a boost.

I would go Debian for stability.

I like fedora since it updates a little more frequently than Debian, but it isn’t a full on rolling release. I used opensuse tumbleweed for a while and it broke on me several times.

I also used arch for a while, but I’m a dad to young children and I just don’t have the time to fuck around with my OS anymore. When I have time to work on my personal dev projects, I just want to drop into tmux, launch neovim and go. After some distro hopping I landed on Fedora with KDE for my desktop and gnome on my laptop. I also have an old netbook running antix with iceWM and an old thinkpad running fedora i3. The latter 2 machines are my hard focus machines.

Debian proper. You’ll have issues with any stylus on Linux. Not to say it won’t work but may need more effort to get working.

I have a Lenovo Flex with Aurora, which is a version of Fedora Atomic with “batteries installed” (nonfree libraries included) and a KDE desktop.

If you prefer Gnome that version is Bluefin.

The advantage of an atomic/immutable distro is that it’s effectively impossible to break, but you can’t tinker with the internals like you would a regular distro. And that’s still with fresh packages hot from the oven about once a week.

There’s no big difference between ubuntu, mint or debian. I am not sure why people try to sell it to you.

Look up if fedora silverblue supports your stylus. Create a live image and test it. If it works, install it. If not fedora, then opensuse aeon.

Fedora Workstation

Mint.

Arch Linux!

For that style of laptops give aurora a try, its basically fedora, but polished for ultralights. I have a surface pro from 2018, still works great, had a harder time with other distros. Good luck.

deleted by creator

I just went through this. LMDE: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s Mint without Ubuntu and it’s pretty great.

I have a 2-in-1 laptop that folds with a touchscreen and Debian has been good for me. Sometimes I have to toggle the auto-rotate on the screen on and off to get it to work again but I doubt that issue is Debian specific. I don’t know about a stylus but even if Debian doesn’t include drivers for it, installing proprietary drivers manually isn’t that bad.

My specs are worse than yours and it runs fine for productivity stuff. I use it for writing, spreadsheets, some web tools, and notes / references while running tabletop games.

Zorin maybe, idk

I would suggest Arch with KDE plasma, I don’t have a stylus so can’t vouch for it personally but I’ve seen it mentioned in the update notes alot.

I went from Ubuntu to MX Linux maybe 6 years ago, it is a fantastic distro, systemd optional, no flatpak/snap, xfce, simple, fast, always up to date for apps (.deb) and kernel.