I keep OpenBSD in reserve, as it were, with the ever increasing amount of crud being put into some distros - Devuan is my choice for ease of use.

I was a long time Debian user - until they forced systemd on us, that made me look around for an alternative, first, AntiX, for many years, (after the demise of #! (Crunchbang) Linux), then the move to Devuan, full time, as I now am.

Welcome, once you have something you like it is difficult to change, but XFCE is a good compromise between heavy weight desktops like Gnome & KDE, which use a lot of resources, & a Window Manager, which is my preference, especially Fluxbox.

If it is a lack of swap, you could create a swap file; but it's always better to have a partition if it is needed.

I think, on XFCE, it is,

Settings > Keyboard > Layout

That's pretty much my recollection too, & when that didn't stop us putting Linux on our machines, they introduced Secure Boot, but our community managed to beat that too, I'm very glad to say.

I'm using Chimaera, & it seems to be perfectly stable - maybe, back up all your personal data, (which you should do anyway), & do a clean install of Chimaera.

Strange behaviour - presumably you did try both USB ports with it - so very strange behaviour from your 'new' laptop.

EDIT: Just noticed, you were putting the image file onto sdb1 - it should be sdb - the disk, not a partition!

My personal configuration is basically twice what you think you need for the root (/) partition, equal swap (/swap) with ram (if you want to 'hibernate'), (else what you think you want), the rest is for home (/home) - (which you will back up to external media every so often, in case you ever have to re install, or your disk goes bad).

The 'ratings' come from people who generally like to try new distros, they are not a popularity rating.

Once people find the distro for them, they seldom go back to Distrowatch, plus these are weekly download figures, many distro hoppers just download to try out new distros, & seldom stay with them more than a few weeks.

The above link gave me a 404 error, try this link
https://www.cocosenor.com/articles/comp … aptop.html

Maybe try (re)installing grub via a 'live' USB drive session(?).

All help will be gratefully received, I have no doubt, if I could be more useful, I would, but I'm just an end user, so I promote Devuan where I can, without making myself into a zealot.

Yep, I remember those posts - seems this person has some kind of memory loss....

We will likely be better off without them.