RHEL binary distros are not available without a paid license (or a limited number of free personal licenses).

https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift

For btrfs snapshots, storage on other disks is not supported.

Timeshift is designed to protect system files and settings. It is NOT a backup tool and is not meant to protect user data.

Anything outside the US. It’s only a US law.

Libraries loaded in RAM are not unloaded. They continue working just fine.

Unattended-upgrades. Set it and forget it.

Drop the requirement for new and you can get plenty of good stuff for free.

You can still run perfectly good software on it. You’ll just be limited by the resources, so you’re not playing Crysis by any means.

Just a few years ago I got a 286 up and running with Minix. It was neat, but I didn’t get as far as compiling the Ethernet driver, so I didn’t really do much with it and it eventually finished its journey to recycling.

Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It’s extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.

This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn’t.

You mean the content pane? Dolphin should also have this at Settings → Detail view → Expandable folders, though I don’t know if what I’m looking at is old. I don’t have a KDE system handy.

If you want to be that particular about your system, you’d be best off just writing your own.

This is not really a highly requested feature, so I’m not sure that it exists. You’d probably be better off writing a simple cloud-init config and using that.

Do you need any of it? Usually I’ve not even thought about what might be on an old drive.

If I was worried about the slim chance there’s something of critical importance I’d need later, I’d just look over each device and pick out individual files I might want, and dump the rest.

If you’re extremely paranoid, I’d take a block-level backup of each device and archive it.

standards.xkcd

Did you verify the media after burning?

The really fun version of that is when people take some of the hallucinated package names from an LLM and create them, but with malware.

I just bought one recently. There’s a bunch of listings on AliExpress. Shipping took a while, obviously, and if you’re in the US, good fucking luck. But the case itself is solid. A little weirdly laid out, but I suppose that’s typical of ITX cases.

I assume you filled in those fields before clicking continue.

Does the installer have a log? Sometimes it’s just on one of the text terminals.

RAID is not backup. RAID is to keep running until you can replace a drive with the spare on hand.

Software RAID is totally fine if that’s what you want to run, no need for a raid controller.

Personally, I don’t bother backing up my desktop systems, I only back up my server VMs. You might want to look at using Ansible to automate system deployment. I use Windows on my desktop, so I use group policy to configure a bunch of settings to my taste.

Alpine, maybe? It’s designed for really skinny installs, like embedded devices that still need full Linux.

I don’t see any spyware, nor any excessive data collection. The listed information looks like the standard information necessary to run an online service.