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 Not all software is available from Mint’s repos and they may be out of date.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.

“It’s just horror, bro” with the same kind of energy as “it’s just a prank, bro”.

I’ve not played the game, but “person riding another person in horse gear” is absolutely a fetish thing, intentional or otherwise.

I think it absolutely would fall afoul of kiddie porn laws. Honestly, I think any depiction of a child in proximity to nudity probably would count.

It’s easy to get fame as a programmer: Just make a popular open source project and you’ll be surrounded by people angry at you for not doing enough upaid work on it.

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.

The price for this upgrade will be… free. We don’t believe paying for a technical upgrade is reasonable.

Not sure if throwing shade here is intentional or not. :P

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.

When you plug your mechanical keyboard in, your steam deck shuts off, right? If you unplug it again, does it instantly come back to life or do you need to press the power button? Does it resume from suspend or actually boot from scratch?

Are you using the dock with a mains power connection (e.g. for charging)? The keyboard might require more voltage than the Steam deck can provide.

Does your keyboard have any of its own USB ports on the side? Having another “hub” connected to your main hub might be confusing it in some way.

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

When I was a kid my parents would only let me play games for half an hour a day. That works out at, using the monthly times, three times as much as Microsoft is letting people use.

Microsoft, is it an ad supported tier or a limited trial. Pick one.

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.

Looking at how much of a reach some of the disruptive + proprietary stuff is… Yeah, there isn’t a lot of recent innovative proprietary stuff, is there?

Although I would put Chrome under “disruptive”. It absolutely was when it released decades ago, and even now it’s still changing the browser landscape.

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…