SavvyWolf

There’s tons of backup solutions out there. Why should selfhosters buy a proprietary one?

Most applications that are Electron either only support Windows or also want to support Android, iOS and Web. I assume there is some toolkit out there that supports everything, but honestly HTML5 is more well known and tested.

For the swap space, yes that’s for when you run out of RAM. 48GiB is plenty of RAM, so you should be fine without it. I have 32GiB of RAM on my system and have been running without swap for ages without issue.

Hardening guides like that are mostly designed for things like web servers which are connected to the public internet and need higher scrutiny. The default configuration for distros like Mint should be secure enough for the average user.

However, don’t feel invincible and run random code from random sites. Both Windows and Linux can’t protect you against malicious code you run yourself.

Having organised partitions is the kind of thing that people obsessed with organisation do. For most people, the default partitioning scheme is fine. However, as always, remember to keep backups of important data.

For installing software, Mint has a Software Centre (which is distinct from the Snap Store). I’d recommend installing software using that for the average user.

In Mint, there are three main types of packages:

• Debian/APT packages, which are provided by Mint (well, technically by the Debian distro and they trickle down to Mint, but technicalities). Not all software is available from Mint’s repos and they may be out of date.
• Flatpak packages, which are provided either by developers themselves or dedicated fans. They are usually more up to date and have a degree of sandboxing.
• Snap packages, which are controlled by a company named Canonical. As of late, Canonical has been a bit “ehhhh”, so there’s pushback against Snap. Mint has it disabled and has their reasoning explained here: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html

Mint’s software centre is able to install both Debian and Flatpak packages. I’d recommend using it where possible since it allows automatic upgrades and easier installation/uninstallation.

Who is this “we”?

There is no need to be diplomatic against those that exploit and harm the livelihoods of the people in this community.

Just have replaceable Li-ion batteries.

It’s open source. If 32 bit support is important enough, people can fork and maintain it.

Don’t know if this is true for all environments, but you might be able to just create a file in ~/Templates for it to show up in that list.

This is why you use Arch/Nix because the package is likely in their repos.

The software probably still won’t work, but you can waste more time on it.

Dual booting is fine. Bitlocker just makes it so that the installer isn’t able to resize the Windows partition (since it’s encrypted), but you can resize it in Windows to create enough space to put Mint on. You can also disable bitlocker entirely, but your files will no longer be encrypted.

There’s worry about the bootloader being nuked, but I think that’s a bit of an overreaction. Now everything is EFI, Windows shouldn’t touch other OSes. If it does, then that doesn’t require a full reinstall; it’s possible to boot from the live USB (the installer) and reinstall just the bootloader.

I don’t know if they still do it, but Mint used to do staggered updates (through their update manager) for some packages. They would start out making the update only available for, say, 10% of people and then slowly built up to 100% if no issues were discovered.

One thing that many guides tend to skip is how to install software. People coming from Windows might try to install software the “Windows way” by going to the website and downloading them. That is just likely to cause pain and suffering for a number of reasons.

Instead, every beginner friendly distro has its own flavour of software centre that users should be encouraged to use instead. Maybe even include a link to flathub in the guide or something.

Last time I used the recomp, which has the randomiser built in. The game looks and runs much nicer through it.

https://www.shipofharkinian.com/

I grew up with Zelda Ocarina of Time, so now every time I feel like playing it I use a randomiser to put all the items in random locations. It makes every playthrough more unique and interesting.

Nowadays I find myself checking changelogs to see what features they’ve broken and what AI features I now need to disable…

Encryption and offsite backups. If someone nicks it then they don’t get any private information. And with backups it’s easy enough to just push the data onto a new device.

I got upset earlier today because some of my friends were better at sodokus than me. I’m supposed to be the smart socially inept one. Don’t take my smarts away. ;_;

Ubuntu 25.10 entered beta on September 18th. It releases on October 9th. It’s still in beta.

… Yeah? Beta software having bugs isn’t the hottest of takes.

I’m willing to bet that if the GNU coreutils getting bumped a minor version caused widespread issues for a day, nobody would even bother reporting in it…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOUUS6JIRQ0

Have a very nostalgic theme for a very specific group of people. :P