HappySkyPoodle

sans-serif fonts are easier to read, especially on low-res screens like smart watches and to lesser extent phones

Sounds like a bunch of marketing speak. Hold on to your 2700k's.

Tinfoil hat much? Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution. The biggest advantage of using Ubuntu (or an Ubuntu flavour) for new users is that if you have any problems with it you can just google "bluetooth not working ubuntu" and 99% you'll get an answer. That's because it's so popular. CentOS is RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the Red Hat branding removed for trademark reasons. It's an enterprise-oriented distro, focused on stability in an enterprise environment. For that reason, it ships very old versions of packages in its package repositories and some newer stuff is missing entirely. If you're using it on your personal laptop, that's great, but to suggest someone to do the same without explaining the implications of doing so is stupid. Fedora is the end-user distribution from some of the same people behind RHEL/CentOS.

Kodi (formerly XBMC) has plugins for both Soundcloud and Youtube.

rtorrent with the rutorrent web interface. takes a while to set it up, but it's the most lightweight and flexible torrent client available for any os. here is a guide on multiple watch folders: http://keycorner.org/pub/text/doc/RTorrentCommonTasks.html#Movecompletedtorrentstodifferentdirectorydependingonwatchdirectory I do not recommend using proxies for torrents with any client. Due to how proxies work, you won't be able to listen for incoming connections (as if you had a "NAT Problem" ), may experience subpar download speeds and they don't hide your IP anyway. Use a VPN instead.

Everyone has a different opinion on what's the best language to learn, but the truth is that there's no right answer to this question. Learn whatever language is appropriate for what you want to be doing. People like to hate on Java, but it's arguably the best language for learning about algorithms, object-oriented programming and design patterns, which is what they will teach you during the first two years of your degree.

On my desktop, I dual boot Hardened Gentoo for work and Windows 10 for gaming. I have it set up so I can boot the Linux partition in VMware Player while I'm using Windows, so I never have to leave Linux. My mum uses ElementaryOS on her laptop and my grandma has a Chromebook. They love it. I use i3 with dmenu as my window manager. I found it to be the only tiling window manager that I was happy with out of the box and I'm the most productive in it. I did not even feel the need to mess around with the default keybindings, they're great. I think every Linux user should try it at some point. In a few months, I'm planning to build a NAS that doubles as an HTPC and a Steam in-house streaming box. It will most likely be based on the ASRock C2750D4I motherboard (12 SATA ports!) in the Fractal Design Node 804 case. It's gonna run Gentoo (obviously) with OpenZFS for the filesystem. Never been a huge fan of FreeNAS. Everything that it does I can do myself in the terminal and the UI simply gets in the way.

Sounds like there's an app running in the background preventing your computer from shutting down. Are there any applications left in the taskbar, tray or in task manager after everything gets closed? I'd also recommend opening Command Prompt as an administrator (right click in start menu) and running "sfc /scannow" to check for system file corruption. It could also be an issue with fast boot as kameshss has said.

Wow. Good thing I didn't accept that job offer from HP.

Depends on your BIOS. If your BIOS doesn't support it, you can try installing Plop Boot Manager on one of your smaller flash drives (or a CD). It acts as a shim for booting from devices your BIOS does not support. Never used it with a card reader before, but it's definitely worth a try.

right click the volume icon on the taskbar, go to sounds -> communications, change "reduce the volume of other sounds..." to "do nothing"

If you can stretch your budget to £100 and have the desk space for bookshelf-style speakers, I'd recommend the M-Audio AV42s. I own the older model, the AV40s and they produce more bass with their bass reflex port than the subwoofer in my parents' home theatre set. There is also a cheaper model closer to your budget, the AV32s and at £70 they will probably still sound better than most "computer speakers". Good speakers cost a lot more than a good pair of headphones.

It's very easy to make a Linux LiveUSB. Actually, I used to get in trouble at school for using booting Linux on the school PCs. The biggest problem with USB sticks is that they have a limited number of write cycles and (with very few exceptions) don't support TRIM. Cheap ones die fairly quickly.

Also, since you have an AMD APU, you should know that the official, proprietary AMD graphics drivers for Linux are kinda bad. They got slightly better after Steam for Linux came out, but expect slightly less performance, battery life and more noise/heat that you would get running Windows.

If you're new to Linux, you should try Ubuntu. Perhaps not the standard Unity flavour, since you want something lightweight. Lubuntu and Xubuntu are both great. Linux Mint uses Cinnamon for its desktop environment, which a lot of people really like, but it uses even more resources than Unity. If you're feeling adventurous and want to learn a thing or two about Linux, you could try installing Arch Linux. It's more lightweight than Ubuntu, always comes with the latest versions of applications, the community is awesome and you'll know exactly what's running on your system since you set it up yourself. Stop saying things are awful without giving a reason why. Ubuntu is fine for new users. CentOS is an enterprise distribution and it's ridiculous to suggest on a personal laptop for school over something like Ubuntu.