Your logic is sound.

The motive and skillet are certainly there.

But there sure are many eyes on RedHat’s source code, and IBM has a lot to lose if they got caught putting in a back door.

Plus, the US government uses it for their own sensitive stuff, so one would hope they have the wisdom not to shit where they eat, installing a back door that 100% would get used against them.

None of my arguments really outweigh yours, if I’m honest.

But I also don’t blame anyone who trusts RedHat Linux, today.

+1 to this line on inquiry.

When I’ve managed to get a modern Linux desktop to freeze, I’ve had a bad power supply, or heat issues, each time ( specifically when I have had a full freeze, where even the alternate terminals didn’t respond ).

No, I can’t access another tty during a freeze, unfortunately.

That’s may be a hint!

The only times I’ve had the desktop freeze on Linux and the alternate terminals fail to respond, I had a hardware issue.

In one case, I was on a Raspberry Pi, and my power supply was not delivering clean enough power for the board.

In another case, my fan wasn’t connected properly and the motherboard was overheating.

Edit: Oh! I think I had this behavior once with a RAM stick that was terribly subtly not quite all the way in the slot.

Good question.

Seems like waypipe is needed for Wayland. https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/getting_started_with_the_gnome_desktop_environment/remotely-accessing-an-individual-application-wayland_getting-started-with-the-gnome-desktop-environment

I initially misread your question as “What good is remote desktop software?” and I thought, "look at this person, humble bragging that they are fit enough to occasionally walk across the room.

I guess now I need to go exercise.

Also ssh -X is nice.

I second the recommendation of Linux Mint. Try a Live USB, and see if it feels fast. If it does, it is a great option.

In terms of theme, have you considered that Linux Mint’s theme is sexy as hell? I wouldn’t install it apologetically. I think it sells itself well.

Edit: and the practical stuff is all in the same places as on Windows, anyway. Start menu is in the lower left. Bar is along the bottom. Time and network applet are in the lower right.

The few ways I have noticed it is different seem to be because Mint doesn’t require corporate branding and names a few things in plain language, instead of MS jargon.

To me, XMPP is still the instant messaging gold standard. Everything has an app (or seventeen apps) supporting it, and it tends to just work.

My experiences with XMPP are: very good.

Matrix does more. I have used it on and off for fancier online meet-up type stuff. As others have said, it is relatively new, and that has various costs and drawbacks.

I won’t use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice.

Once again, I’m impressed by Stallman’s focus on not accepting a bad faith arguement at face value.

We didn’t always have shitty laws about when we can copy a file.

Some of us remember when creators had to get creative how they monetized their work, instead of bludgeoning fans with the threat of jail time.

Paranoia is good.

That said, I’ve run his build for a year or so without any issues.

Wayland’s security model comes wiþ trade-offs.

I try not to be too quick to blame the security nerds, because I’m afraid they will shut off my access. (I joke. I love you all…and please don’t shut off my access.)

But it is probably the security nerd stuff. (Thank you for keeping me safe, security nerds.)

Gnome is going through growing pains right now.

I think it discovered it needed to use a different X/Y definition to be true to itself, or something.

KDE seems okay.

You’ve got a bunch of answers already, but I haven’t seen explicit mention that SteamDeck is Linux, so beside ProtonDB, you can also check your favorite game on Steam.

My experience has been that a “SteamDeck Verified” or “SteamDeck Playable” badge means the game runs well on my Linux PC as well.

It’s not terribly interesting anymore. I notice two categories of games that don’t trivially run on Linux:

• Games with invasive anti-cheat tools, where the Anti-cheat tool simply isn’t available on Linux. (Common with multiplayer competitive shooters.)
• Games old enough not to be compatible with modern game engines and unpopular enough not to have received a remaster. Some “classic” N64 era Star Wars games that I still like fall into this. (The ones that cost about $3 each on Steam). I still play them on Linux, but it takes some effort and patience.

And there’s the standard cutting edge game disclaimer: Linux isn’t magic. I find games with specific high-end requirements that are still difficult to run on Windows or Mac are usually only slightly easier to run on Linux.

Looked around at a few other distros…nope, still love Mint. 10/10, would do it all over again.

I can relate.

I love to research my next obscure Linux configuration - from the comfort of my trusty reliable Linux Mint PC.

Good point!

I have done this with a USB key. It worked fine.

If you have a network share available, it can be a git remote.

cd NETWORKSHARE
mkdir dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles.git
git init --bare

cd $HOME/dotfiles
git remote add origin NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git

Then do git push and git pull operations as usual. The files at NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git will not be readable, but will have the full history of changes.

If your monitor is currently connected via HDMI, and supports any other type of cable, I would try any other type of cable.

I have had similar issues when the Digital Rights Management (DRM) layer of HDMI was having timing issues, causing a blank screen.

In my case, it would sometimes work, if the power up / wake up / boot up cycles of the monitor and CPU happened to align, but on certain of my PC builds the timing tended to not match up during most boots, and I usually got a blank screen.

Edit: Oh, and classic advice for the ages - when I have the monitor hooked up to a graphics card, I switch it (the monitor cable) over (to the motherboard) for one boot and see if that fixes things long enough to pull some log files and get more info.

My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.

Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.

It’s meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.

Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.

This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.

I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.

That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.

There’s so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.

Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.

Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft’s source code.