Here are three variants of Linux Mint with different Desktop Environments: (click their example image to make it larger)

• Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition) - the default, I’d use that until you have a reason not to
• Linux Mint (MATE Edition)
• Linux Mint (XFCE Edition)

All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don’t like something about Cinnamon.

Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu’s desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think “wow, this person’s a hacker”, where they’ll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the “best of both worlds” midpoint is a dynamic WM? I’m not sure. hyprland is an example of that.

Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you’re doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I’d also make a list of things you’ve installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they’re all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.

The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they’re both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.

Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn’t have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.

Yeah, props to the Nanoleaf team for helping the author out. Win-win. The author says at the end that they intend on sharing it around more once it has more polish, so I hope they upstream it properly and demonstrate to Nanoleaf that helping out volunteers helps their product reach more customers. (I know it’s iffy to suggest it’s ok to neglect Linux and let us sort it out ourselves, but if we get open-source drivers in the process with the help of the company, I think that’s a net win)

Good to hear. I was very very slightly disappointed when I read Pelican was a Python tool. I’m also a Hugo user.

Take pride in a minimalist webpage.

Last week I was thinking of making a meme pointing out how all the famously ultra-minimalist http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and its many rebuttals are really put to shame by this one. Also, you’ve reminded me of some of those little webring banners people would put on their site bragging about being minimal, which are fun.

Keyboard has too many keys, bloat/10

probs don’t need that mouse either

I don’t know, but my guess is it might still be able to detect some cross-platform malware signs and detect malware intended for Windows on Linux machines (e.g. I can download a PDF or .docx that is harmless on my machine, but if I reupload and a Windows user downloads it, I’ve spread malware regardless). IIRC ClamAV is sometimes used to scan attachments on an email server, often looking for Windows exploits being sent through the server.

Yes it’s ToS, and also its structure - it’s basically a non-profit club rather than a for-profit business like GitHub (now owned by M$), which means it isn’t prone to enshittifying.

That spam was a troll who found a loophole in the notification system. It was obviously not a data breach. That’s clear to anyone who’s worked with software databases or web servers.

Me. The work I’m using them for doesn’t need collaboration or sharing. But it’s important to also have collaborative ones up my sleeve.

I’m using formula calculations and visual graphs, so a CLI-managed CSV just won’t work for me.

Those are both great points, thanks for explaining.

Mussolini called it a merger of the corporation and the state, and he’s the guy who started it

That’s not what corporatism is, it’s a different meaning of the word “corporation”.

You’re absolutely correct that fascism is an illiberal capitalist ideology, but Mussolini framed their movement as pro-labour, not pro-capitalist. We must learn to recognize Classical Fascism’s class-collaborationist hypothesis as flawed and pro-capitalist, especially since this rhetoric is often echoed in social democracy.

Why is it wrong to promote the things a shitty person makes?

It’s FOSS, so using it doesn’t give them money. On the other hand, a user might voluntarily donate if they’re unaware.

One might claim they’re being given a platform in the community by people promoting their product, but on the other hand I hear more loudly that they’re toxic, fascist and banned from various places.

Anything else to add?

For what it’s worth, the school computers in my school weren’t running Linux and they had Tuxpaint installed. Even proprietary OS users benefit from FOSS.

Anyone wondering about the grep for balls results around 11:40, it looks like Spotify uses zxcvbn as a password strength checker, which contains some dictionary lists of common words people put in passwords, in order of how common they are.

Hackers will use this as one main technique for password guessing (as opposed to a simple brute force, like “0000”, “0001”, “0002”, … , “9999”, it will probably be faster if we start with “1234”, “1776”, etc.). When I say ‘dictionary’, I don’t just mean English words; the name of zxcvbn itself is an example of a common pattern, one that people think they’re really smart for choosing and super easy to remember and type, but one hackers will obviously be aware of too, just like turning password into P455w0rd1!.

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn for general info

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn/tree/master/data has the .txt files

Sure, pity he’s an edgy shit who caters to nazi scum, but I really don’t see how it matters to this situation. Pointing out that Nazis like Linux too is like pointing out Hitler endorsed vegetarianism - that’s not “bad PR” for vegetables, Linux isn’t some corporation paying for celebrity endorsements as a reputation. All that really matters, as far as I see, is that Pew made a large and diverse audience turn their heads away from Windows and Mac towards Linux for half an hour, it’s a rare good thing, and I still don’t like them or really care about them. I’m definitely not going to be sad or think we need to stop this, I’ll just make sure to continue rejecting any reactionary scum who show their faces in the communities.

For quick little clips I sometimes use ffmpeg like that, but if I want to do anything more complicated like optimizing file size (without a known target), I often jump to Handbrake, a graphical interface to FFmpeg.

That script seems pretty neat, I’ll copy it. Gotta love an 8MB copy of Shrek 2.

Same, for quick-and-easy hobby work, it’s a great tool. Sometimes I will be surprised by looking up a video effect and seeing it can be done in kdenlive.

A few years back there was a bug with my set-up where it would crash when moving clips a certain way, but once that was solved, kdenlive has been smooth sailing for me.

Thanks for sharing the channel, I checked one of those tutorials (I can’t watch more rn) and it’s very well made, putting the end result right at the start, bringing up special considerations like watching for lighting changes or cloud movements in background footage.

By the way, what kind of “TikTok effects” are you talking about? Dynamic transitions and shaky-cam effects, or other things too?

My only gripe was that it doesn’t handle (unencoded) spaces in a URL name, which is probably correct behavior but they’re in the titles of torrents on some sites, so I’d have to manually edit them each time. I ended up just using qBT.