Honestly, IMO Mint is just Ubuntu without all the scetchy stuff. The only real major difference (besides the packaging debate) is the default graphical shell.

If you like gnome shell, I wonder if it’s worth installing Mint and then gnome-shell…

Worth noting that if you’re trying to block telemetery or ads or things like that, using an adblocking dns is probably the better option. Either through a pihole on your network or some online adblocking dns.

Other than that, if you’re looking for one because you think you “need” one, don’t worry too much if it’s just a personal computer connected to a router. Most distros ship with sensible defaults for security.

If you actually want to use a firewall, block all incoming and allow all outgoing is a reasonable rule of thumb if you aren’t running a server. Note that “block incoming” doesn’t block connections that the system itself started.

Wonder if we’ll have another good ol’ browser war when/if Ladybird releases.

Yeah, was more poking fun of people who cling to the while Unix Philosophy stuff like it’s some unwritten rule that must be followed.

I honestly think there’s tons of Linux software that could be broadly defined as “multiple things”.

Even looking at the links other responders have posted, I even think a lot of linux software is made up of components which are tightly coupled together.

Praise be the Unix Philosophy. May all your projects do precisely one thing, and let they not be tempted by forbidden fruit and do two things.

If you’re worried about stability, I think the NTFS driver will probably be more widely used and tested than WinBTRFS. Of course, nothing is 100% bug free, and disks can fail at any time for no reason. Instead of looking for a stable filesystem, I’d suggest setting up backups such that a random failure every few years doesn’t cause everything to be lost.

Check /etc/skel/.bashrc, if it’s in there as well, it was set up by your distro.

What it does is check for the existence of ~/.bashrc.d and, if it finds one, sources all the files inside it. This effectively means that you can create script files like ~/.bashrc.d/myfile.sh and they will have the same effect as if they had been put directly into .bashrc. Some people prefer having one file for each “bashrc thing” whilst some prefer just having one big file. Ultimately it’s personal preference.

If you beleive them, as far as I recall, Valve has said that they were working on the Steam Deck before the switch was revealed.

“Did you run the formatter on this?”

Bonus points if it’s python code and nowhere in the docs does it say which of the many formatters to use.

People seem oddly optimistic about all of this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the solution they came up with still wouldn’t work in Linux. I don’t know how exactly they’d do it, but I can imagine some encryption key or hardware nonsense that Linux can’t replicate.

I’ve been using Protonmail and it does the job (although not for free). To use it with Thunderbird I need to use a “bridge” background app to decrypt it though.

I use Thunderbird. I’m sure there might be other ones that are better, but it does the job.

Looking at the video they posted, surely the act of navigating and selecting a location via the file save portal should implicitly give permission?

Iirc, that’s something Flatpak allows.

I think Windows has a very poor track record for ui consistency as well. It feels like every Windows app wants to roll its own UI; Firefox, Discord, Steam etc. I know Discord and Steam also have those issues on Linux as well, but it feels like every Windows app wants to roll out it’s own window decorarions and theme.

Honestly, I’m pleased at how consistent most gtk based apps look.

If my /bin contains exe files, something has gone very wrong somewhere…

Also, all these infographics are a sad casualty of the /usr/bin merge.

There’s a package called molly-guard which will check to see if you are connected via ssh when you try to shut it down. If you are, it will ask you for the hostname of the system to make sure you’re shutting down the right one.

Very usefull program to just throw onto servers.

I think user friendly distros (like Mint) are very user friendly if you’re just doing simple things like web browsing or using Steam. Mint (and other distros) have a realy nice software centre that can install a lot of software with a single click from https://flathub.org/ , which removes a lot of headaches that there used to be with installing software.

However, when things go wrong (which they do sometimes because computers are complicated), you may have to troubleshoot and play around with the command line.

… But that’s honestly happened a lot with Windows in my experience as well. Only with less command line and more running esoteric exes.

Honestly, given that most Linux distros are free anyway, you may as well try it out and see if everything works. Worst comes to worst, you find something doesn’t work and end up installing Windows over the top of it.

I have a server that has multiple services running under multiple users that each store data. I want to be able to bundle all this data up and send it to another server for backups.

At a high level, how do I manage permissions for this? Currently I run the backup as root, then chown it to a special backups user which can log in through ssh. But this all feels clunky to me.

I’ve been using Sidebery. Decent little addon for a tab sidebar.

Oh wow, in the opening paragraph they say that there’s a huge conspiracy covering up the “truth” behind Cosmic’s reception. And that they are the one voice of reason to enlighten people about The Truth…