Your taxes, straight into the pockets of Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.

True. Not everyone needs to chase the latest stuff, apart from security patches.

Recently I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, PopOS! and Ubuntu, as well as Mint, and all of these have comparable graphical software managers. Which ones are you thinking of that don’t?

Mint is not really for tinkerers. It’s a distro designed to work out of the box without the need to tweak anything, and it does that well. The downsides are that it’s not always the most up to date, and it bundles a lot so it’s not a slim distro.

It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.

I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won’t boot it makes recovery more difficult. It’s a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.

The notes there say that everything works except that the canvas flickers. Sounds minor but probably makes it unusable. Probably best to install it in a Windows VM if you need it. The Affinity stuff is very good.

I don’t understand your comment. Steganography in computing is about hiding messages inside other media, but this doesn’t in itself achieve any kind of encryption. The current discussion is about encryption, and whether it should have backdoors (the answer is no). Even if you hide your message in an image or video file, you still face the question of how to encrypt it. So steganography seems orthogonal to the debate about encryption.

I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.

Does Steam ever deliver Linux-native builds instead of running games through Proton?

Are there any actual controlled comparative studies of filesystems, rather than just anecdotes from the internet?

The article doesn’t mention or recommend Tumbleweed as far as I can see.

Coming from Windows I miss the excitement and suspense of never knowing whether my click on an icon actually got noticed by the OS. And the thrill of never knowing exactly which icon you clicked on because the UI is so slow to draw and redraw itself that the icons move unexpectedly while you’re aiming. Oh, and the unpredictable surprise of focus stealing.

I second this suggestion. I have an old touchscreen PC from about 2001 with a Via Eden CPU, which is an incredibly feeble low-power processor that lacks some instructions that were common even in 32-bit days, and Antix was the only reasonably modern distro I could get to run on it.

Honestly I can’t remember the details. It was a few months ago and it may have been just a temporary thing or a quirk of my installation. I think it had to do with some component relating to DBus not being present that I couldn’t figure out how to fix.

I had trouble using Flatseal to adjust permissions for Flatpak applications in Linux Mint. But that was a few months ago and may have been fixed. Other than that I never really had trouble with stuff being broken or unavailable in Mint.

I guess if you use very new hardware you might prefer a newer kernel than the one Mint uses. Or if you want the latest versions of packages, a rolling distro might suit you better. Or you might prefer a different filesystem. But if none of this bothers you, there’s no need to switch. Mint generally works well.

I spend a lot of my workday looking at windows that have turned white and “not responding”, or clicking on things and waiting a minute to see whether the click worked, or waiting for the Start menu to allow me to type, or waiting for the indexing service to spare me a little bit of my computer for my own use, etc. Then I come home to Linux and remember how computers can actually be fast and satisfying to use.

This rubbish reads like it was written by ChatGPT.

This article is from 2018.