It has been my experience that avoiding games with shitty features like microtransactions and whatnot, or where the studio treats its staff poorly, that kind of thing, also virtually guarantees Linux compatibility. Funny that.

It’s a Klingon tea-like beverage. A warrior’s drink!

It’s pronounced “juh-know-may.”

Somehow I never considered that, MacOS’ stupid stoplight buttons aren’t particularly accessible, are they?

You can, though it might not be a great experience. Using Gnome on Mint especially is kind of funny tasting given the distro’s history.

Mint used to ship a KDE version but stopped to focus on other things, as there were plenty of distros that offered a good KDE experience. Kubuntu and KDE Neon are both fairly close to what Mint KDE would offer.

When Gnome decided to do whatever Gnome 3 was, a lot of people didn’t want that. And I know of four DEs now that sprang up that were trying to fill the void that Gnome 3 sucked into the world with its creation:

• Mate. The good old fashioned “we don’t like the changes, so we’re gonna fork it and keep making the old thing ourselves.” Mate is Gnome 2 that kept on chooglin.

• Cinnamon. At first, the folks who ran Mint tried to release a set of extensions for Gnome 3 to make it work more like Gnome 2, then decided to fork Gnome 3 to make their own DE and called it Cinnamon.

• Unity. Canonical’s DE they made during their “re-invent every single wheel” phase. They abandoned it in favor of Gnome with some extensions to make it look a little like Unity did, and my understanding is some teenager picked it back up.

• Cosmic. If I understand right, and I might not, System76 has bent Gnome into such a pretzel for Pop!_OS that they’re calling it their own thing called Cosmic.

Mint ships two of these four DEs. They make Cinnamon themselves and they work pretty closely/share members with the Mate community. They also offer an xfce version for a few reasons, another GTK-based DE that isn’t GNOME.

So using Gnome on Mint, the “anything oh god anything but Gnome” distro is just kinda funny to me.

First to clarify, you mean with the clutch pedal “out.” Pushing the pedal down actually disengages the clutch, ie forcing the plates apart to disconnect the engine from the transmission.

In a gasoline powered car that is in gear, yes there is a braking effect. Diesel engines don’t, which is why semi trucks have a thing called a Jake Brake.

Also, depending on what went wrong with your engine/why it is shut down, you may not want to choose to do this.

I’ve had very good luck with Linux Mint and a GTX-1080. It does require opening the Driver Manager and clicking the button with “Recommended” next to it.

My definition of software bloat is when the feature set creeps up to including features that the vast majority of users do not need to a degree that starts impeding the usefulness and usability of the software.

FreeCAD, for example. FreeCAD has several workbenches that it did or still does ship with that no one has a use for. The Robot bench, for example, which simulates those giant robot arms that build cars. The venn diagram of people who work with those robots and people who use FreeCAD are two circles 284 miles apart. There is/was a Ship bench that could draw a boat hull in one click. No one on earth needs that. A working Assembly bench? Still years away. Who on earth needs that? I’ve hidden a full third of the stock workbenches just to reduce the noise in the dropdown menu and it’s made the software more comfortable to use.

Linux Mint includes a LOT of little utilities, lots of little CLI programs and whatnot that the majority of users will never use, but other than occupying a few dozen MB of disk space it’s not really a problem. It doesn’t get in the way.

And why the fuck does a calculator app take 60MB of RAM when perfectly functional calculators ran on Windows 3.1 on systems with 8-24MB of RAM total?

I’ve played quite a bit of Satisfactory on Linux. Proton is some amazing stuff.

Yes.

1. Back up your files.

2. When building the computer, go for generic middle of the road normal hardware. Fairly easy to do with off the shelf ATX PC hardware. Inside the case, this usually means look out for weird graphics cards or motherboards. I’ll warn you that Asrock RGB lighting doesn’t like to play with open source control software. Outside the case, pick a keyboard and mouse that don’t require (much) in the way of configuration because Razer and Corsair don’t publish their bullshitware for Linux yet.

3. Back up your files.

4. I recommend spending some time with whatever current hardware you have trying out a few distros in a virtual machine. Don’t just look around and go “ah that’s nice. ah that’s weird.” Actually use it to do your work. Even though you’re running Linux IN Windows, try to use Linux to do actual stuff.

5. Back up your files.

6. Choosing a distro. Isn’t really all that important, at least at first. Most of the meaningful differences are going to be in the Desktop Environment anyway. There’s about 18 different GUIs you can use, from weird tiling window managers the hardcore nerds tend to like, to more Windows like experiences in KDE and Cinnamon, to more Apple like experiences with Gnome and Pantheon. Try a few out in virtualbox.

7. Back up your files.

8. Learn a little bit about the terminal. A lot of people hate and fear that suggestion, but it can honestly be fun. Wait till you see what the command fortune | cowsay | lolcatdoes. Learn how to edit files, run commands, install software via the terminal, even if you don’t plan on doing it that way routinely. Mainly, so that if you ask the community for help, you’re not completely in the dark when given a terminal command to run. Which is often the case; because “click here then here then there then tell us what it says” is harder to convey than “copy paste this command into the terminal, and then copy-paste what it says.” There’s a lot of cool stuff hidden in there.

9. Back up your files.

10. Have fun!

Being I’m on Mint Cinnamon and using an Nvidia card, I’ve never even tried to run Wayland on this machine. Seems to work okay on the little Lenovo I put Fedora GNOME on. X11 is still working remarkably well for me, and I’m looking forward to the new features in Wayland once the last few kinks are worked out with it.

Kali Linux is a pretty specific tool, it’s not suited for use as a daily driver desktop OS.

It is my understanding that Kali is based on Debian with an xfce desktop, so if you want a similar experience (same GUI, same package manager) in a daily driver OS, you can start there.

The practical difference is the package manager; Debian-based systems use dpkg/APT with the .deb package format, Arch uses Pacman with .pkg packages.

Debian-based distros use a stable release cycle, so there are version numbers. The ecosystem is maintained for each version for an extended period of time, so if you have a workflow that requires a specific era of software, you can stick with an older version of the OS to maintain compatibility. This does not necessarily mean the software remains unpatched; security or stability patches are applied, this tends to mean the system is stable. Arch-based distros use a rolling release, basically what they said they were going to do with Windows 10 being the “last” version of Windows and they’d just keep updating it. Upside: Newest versions of packages all the time. Downside: Newest versions of packages all the time. You get the latest features, and the latest bugs.

Debian-based distros don’t have a unified method of distributing software beyond the standard repositories. Ubuntu tried with PPAs, which kind of sucked. Arch has the Arch User Repository, or AUR.

Arch itself is designed to be an a la carte operating system. It starts out as a fairly minimal environment and the user will install the components they want and only the components they want, though many Arch-based distros like Manjaro and EndeavorOS offer pre-configured images. Debian was one of the earliest distros shipped ready to go as a complete OS; I know of no system that offers the “here’s a shell and a package manager, install it yourself” experience on the Debian family tree.

But given an installed and configured Debian and Arch machine, what can one do that the other can’t? As in, can it run [application]? Very little.

Playing with a Raspberry Pi inside my own home network with nothing important going on and I turned the Pi off when I’m done. Like why worry about it at that point?

In Terminal land, Ctrl+C has meant Cancel longer than it’s meant copy. Shift + Insert does what you think Ctrl+V will do.

Also, there’s a separate thing that exists in most window managers called the Primary buffer, which is a separate thing from the clipboard. Try this: Highlight some text in one window, then open a text editor and middle click in it. Ta da! Reminder: This has absolutely nothing to do with the clipboard, if you have Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C’d something, this won’t overwrite that.

There are now some ESP32 modules that are RISC-V rather than Xtensa.

That’s one of the biggest things I hate about Gnome, it aims to be as unfinished and feature barren as it can be while still booting to a desktop, and you’re supposed to install the rest of it from third parties.

Install Mint Cinnamon and then take your pick of the available spices.

with which finger.