Bob Smith

If your showerthought is true, then what do you suppose that I have been doing while shuffling aimlessly through life since the invention of paperback books and smartphones, eh? Living like a pig? How dare you.

Stay away from Chromebooks. Even if you get a Chromebook that is reported to play well with Linux, there can be issues. I have/had two different Linux Chromebooks. They both had unique pitfalls.

I had an arm-based Chromebook that was actually the development target of a custom distro. At its best, it still required a fairly specific wifi dongle to work without kernel hacks. Even then, the processor was slooow and storage was a bit of a problem if I was using it for anything other than text editing.

I’m running an intel-based Chromebook these days with Arch. The biggest bottleneck is the built-in nonupgradeable storage (16gb). Most of my home folder is symlinked to an SD card that I keep in the slot at all times. It works well and has great battery life, but there are easier ways to play with linux on a laptop.

With a circle you actually get the lowest possible ratio of friend-fringe to total friend-area, when compared to alternative 2-D friendship n-gons.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, both of which are versioned release distributions. The idea behind versioned releases is that the kernel and a lot of the software are all chosen and tested to work well together. It gives the user a system that won’t change much for several years. Rather than getting the latest and greatest, you get a known, relatively static set that works smoothly and gets security/stability updates rather than big upgrades. Typically, distributions like Mint only get minor security updates to the chosen kernel during their lifetime. You’ll see additional patches to kernel 6.8, but nothing beyond that.

To get a newer kernel, the safest option is to wait until Mint 23 gets released and do a full upgrade to the new version of Mint. Along with the kernel, other pieces of the operating system will get a bump to much newer versions. Mint gives you the option to try newer kernels, but this is less stable and could break your system.

There are other types of Linux distributions that ship new versions of the kernel much more regularly. Rolling releases (to one extent or another) update the kernel and other software shortly after the new code is available and tested.

If the lessons that I’ve learned about lightbulb replacement are applicable, then the nationality of the developers on the bus will impact the answer to your question.

I wish you luck with your campaign!

The sanctions apply to the BSDs too. The only difference with sanctions that I could imagine would be if one of the BSDs had (through happenstance or other factors) a lower starting proportion of Russian developers relative to Linux. If that were the case, then the impact of sanctions on that BSD would be proportionally smaller.

I’m lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn’t think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.

For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I’d care to enumerate. There’s a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!

I’ve never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I’m typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.

Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn’t something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn’t have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I’ve bothered to test - they work fine. I’m currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.

Background: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn’t depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can’t remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don’t game much.

Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That’s about it, but I don’t mind. If you’re trying to run windows programs, you’ll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn’t supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don’t plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.

Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don’t expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.

I’ve been having fun with VoxeLibre lately on single-player mode. Nothing too fancy, gameplay is eerily similar to vanilla Minecraft. I’m looking forward to trying other games built on the engine that offer a bit more variation.

One nice thing is that the android version of Minetest is compatible with the PC version, so it is possible to sync save files and play on the go. It also seems to load faster than Minecraft does.

There’s nothing non-intentional or implicit about denying the franchise to noncitizens. For the vast majority of countries, that is the way citizenship is expressly designed to work as an in-group. Citizenship is generally meant to discriminate against outsiders.

Arch offers a combination of rolling software updates, a simple but easily customized base, pacman for the package manager, the AUR, a barebones installation process by default, good documentation, and active development. That may or may not be a good combination based on your goals.

Other distros offer a different combination of characteristics. Those characteristics are a starting point and you can get to the same destination no matter what you use. The trick is figuring out what starting point is closest to your destination or which starting point makes the journey fun for you. For some people, Arch is that. For plenty of people, Arch isn’t that.

Easy if you go step by step and don’t accidentally skip anything. Archinstall will get you to the same result with lower risk of failure, in a tenth of the amount of time spent. And unless you install operating systems for a living, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Source: Installed Arch on about a dozen different devices, twice without Archinstall.

If you’re looking to learn something, do Linux from Scratch instead. The process is way more granular, way more documented, and way more educational than parroting the steps of installing Arch from the wiki.

I think that phrases like ‘anti-consumer’ can stick to any target, so long as they’re thrown with a sufficient amount of bullshit.

I played around with Mandrake and Debian around the turn of the century. A bit of a break, but then I started dual-booting Ubuntu in the Windows Vista/X86 OSX era. I jumped to Xubuntu and started running Linux by itself on several machines around 2012.

I largely shifted to Arch around the time that snaps came out because they weren’t playing nice with some of my low-end machines. Nowadays, mainly Arch. Exceptions: Fedora on my M1, Debian Bookworm on an old x86 tablet and any time I set up WSL on a Windows machine.

I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I’ll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.

When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don’t have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would’ve thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.

I agree.

A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.