Unfortunately, I’m only given a choice between Boot Display Devices under that menu.

edit: Apparently, there is a menu for it if the T510 is a later model with Optimus support. Early dGPU variants like mine are forced to use the discrete graphics, even if the BIOS is hacked to reveal the menu.

Neither laptop BIOS offers the option to disable discrete graphics :(

I’ve only heard recommendations for Macrium Reflect, but I’ve never used it myself. Never heard anything bad about it either, should be good if it’s what you are most comfortable with.

For the backup, you might want to try out Clonezilla or Rescuezilla (for a GUI option).

Absolutely. I likewise moved to Linux more out of frustration with Windows than any of my own tech ability. It needn’t be a concerted effort either. I had it on a separate SSD (for a more stable dual-boot) and dabbled for a couple of years until I found myself gradually booting into Linux instead of Windows more and more.

Try isolating anything unique to your installation by booting from a live USB of Mint 22.1 or 21.3 and go about your workflow. If it gives the same symptoms, boot from a live USB of Mint 19.3. Hopefully nothing bad happened to your hardware during the update.

Math, particularly snippets from larger manuscripts and documentation thrown around between colleagues. Can’t really predict when they send a .tex and when they send a .md for review.

I was about to suggest disconnecting the disk until I read that you already tried that. What came up when you removed the disk? The fact that it doesn’t go straight to a boot device selection screen or the BIOS is very curious.

Check out pinta, I’ve been using it as my paint.net substitute when I just need to go in and make a few quick edits.

My desktop text editor has an autosave feature, but it only works after you’ve manually saved the file. All I wanted is something like the notes app on my phone, where I can jot down random thoughts without worrying about naming a new file. So here’s the script behind my text editor shortcut, which creates a new text file in ~/.drafts, names it with the current date, adds a suffix if the file already exists, and finally opens the editor:

#!/bin/bash

name=/home/defacto/.drafts/"`date +"%Y%m%d"`"_text
if [[ -e "$name" || -L "$name" ]] ; then
    i=1
    while [[ -e "$name"_$i || -L "$name"_$i ]] ; do
        let i++
    done
    name="$name"_$i
fi
touch -- "$name"
pluma "$name" #replace pluma with your editor of choice

It was in 7 as well, but only the 32-bit edition. edit.com stopped shipping with 64-bit editions.

As others have suggested, QubesOS is a good one to have on your list. I’d probably use if it weren’t for its crippling effects on battery life.

Immutable distros are much friendlier to laptops and, as I understand, update in a way not unlike an Android device would. But I insist on some system-level customizations and I haven’t been motivated to learn how such customizations can be made to survive updates and the like.

I’ve also been eyeing NixOS, but with everything up and running on Debian smoothly for a few years, I haven’t found the excuse to switch yet. Along with customizing it to be a comfortable daily driver, I’ve also been trying to see how secure I can make my system as a fun exercise. While it’s not immutable, Debian is a good base considering the team behind it and how much is riding on its security, including internet-facing servers.

What I’ve done to harden Debian, if anyone’s interested:

• Apply Madaidan’s hardening guide judiciously. Roughly 2/3 of the measures made sense for my use case and it’s almost unnoticeable in my daily workflow.
• Have as few closed-source components as possible. In my case, intel-microcode is the only non-free package on my system.
• Install the hardening-runtime package, but remove its included slub_debug=FPZ kernel argument, which in recent kernels forces less secure unhashed pointers.
• XFCE is still not fully ported to Wayland, so I use slock, the X11 screen locker with fewest lines of code.
• Install the ufw firewall and default to deny
• Enable unattended-upgrades
• Everything including the /boot partition is encrypted. I have built coreboot with just the GRUB2 payload, which I configured to immediately bring up the LUKS password prompt. All other options are behind a password.

I also put together and maintain a ~16 GB clean system image of Debian set up exactly to my taste, which I clone to my machines as needed. This probably wouldn’t have been a thing if I knew about NixOS earlier, and it certainly hasn’t helped me switch over either.

Is the automatic scaling a recently-introduced feature to KDE? I have Plasma 5 on Debian 12, could that be the missing link, or is my configuration just wonky? Hoping to avoid editing every affected shortcut to include Gamescope.

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.

Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I’d install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I’ll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

To be completely honest, I installed Jellyfin “bare-metal” and have been using it that way since after attempting to skim the Docker documentation and failing to understand how Docker works.

Awesome, adding to my current arsenal of alternative clients alongside FreeTube and NewPipe. One less chance for YouTube to force me onto their webpage.

Chicago95 XFCE on Debian is my daily driver. Having been a Windows 2000 fanboy, it makes me feel right at home.

The Raleigh GTK theme ported to GTK 3 on XFCE is also a quick and dirty way to get a 90s-esque look: https://github.com/thesquash/gtk-theme-raleigh

For an entire distro, there’s Hot Dog Linux: https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG

Many of them are single-issue Linux users and don’t concern themselves with FOSS philosophy

Also have been using Debian for the past 3 years. It just works on all of my machines and comes with just enough features to make life easy. Also love the variety of packages and compatibility with pretty much anything I need that isn’t in the official repo.

Many would beg to differ but I love how stable and predictable it is. I have a very particular taste in UI and the less work to maintain that cozy look, the better. Having been a holdout on old Windows versions in the years before I moved to Linux, getting new features at all is already very exciting. I had thought for several years that nothing would beat the comfort and reliability of Windows 2000, but Debian proved me wrong.

If just using the Live CD counts, Lubuntu 12.04, to copy files off a broken Windows machine

Then Ubuntu, followed by Deepin (looked cool), UbuntuDDE, Arch, Xubuntu, and finally settled on Debian in 2022.