Linux Light
I decided to skip Chrome altogether, and soon as the reboot completed I opened the terminal and started an installation of Firefox. That's where Linux Light's almost-perfect record was soiled badly enought that I can't dismiss it as trivial.
Just after starting the installation of Firefox, the Linux Light window reverted to the very small size where it started. I couldn't figure out how to reverse that change, so I was left with no choice but to reboot again. The good news was that Firefox had indeed been installed, and I found it in the Internet menu.
I was able to fetch the Vivaldi.deb file without any drama, but when the that file arrived, the package manager did not intercept it and install Vivaldi. It was just saved to /home/Downloads
. I guess I need to figure out how to do that with Linux Light's package manager. (Or install flatpak and get it that way. We'll see.)
When I saw that their package manager was Synaptic, I was encouraged, because I do have Synaptic skills from long ago. But when I told it to install from a downloaded file, and selected the .DEB file to install, nothing happened. As an aside, when I tried to resize the Synaptic Package Manager with the mouse, I was able to make it wider, but not taller. Same as with the terminal.
So it turns out not be just a terminal issue, but probably a fault of their modified version of Xfce. It seems that resizing only works in the first direction you attempt, after which it fails in the other. If you widen a window, then you can't make it taller. If you adjust the height first, then you can't change the width. That's another not-so-trivial problem, as is the failure for Synaptic PM to install a .DEB file.
Linux Lite has a lot its team can be proud of, but I'm beginning to lose interest in spending a day or two with it as a daily-driver OS. If I have to install flatpak and get Vivaldi that way, I'll do it. But if there are too many more of these cant-be-ignored problems, I won't guarantee anything.
Although I'd done an update a while ago, I just saw another notification of upgrades being available, so I'll install those first and see whether they fix any of the problems I've found.