1. I usually stick with distros that have large userbases. I’ve tried smaller and niche distros before, and inevitably they stop being maintained, or move in a direction I don’t like. The larger distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, have more resources (people, time, money) to spend on testing updates, and have reliable update schedules. When I was younger I didn’t care about that kind of thing, but these days I use my PC almost exclusively for work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, I need my PC to not break when I update it.

Another technique I use is to go to the vendor site for software I use and look at which Linux distros they officially support. Usually they will publish at least an Ubuntu package, sometimes a universal deb file that works on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. Sometimes an RPM package for Fedora/CentOS too. This is getting less relevant these days with Appimage files and Flapak images that work the same across all distros.

It’s natural to get bored or frustrated with one distro and want to try out others. Imagine if Microsoft made many different flavours of Windows that each look and operate differently, everyone who is bored and frustrated with default Windows would be trying them all out, comparing them, debating the pros and cons, communities would form around common favourites.

I have a small gaming PC that I use to test out other distros, I’m currently on Nobara, that I actually highly recommend for a gaming-focused distro.

2. This one is really hard to say. It depends on so many factors like what hardware you are running, what software you plan to run, how tech savvy you are, even your definition of what is an issue. Mint is very stable and easy to use, you may run into zero issues getting it installed, running VSCode, playing some Factorio. Or you might run into a small incompatibility between your GPU and the bundled kernel drivers and run into a whole world of hurt spending days tinkering on the command line with no usable graphics driver.

3. I believe Mint still comes with the Cinnamon Desktop, that is specifically designed to be familiar and easy for users transitioning from Windows. It’s not super customisable, but I think it can do what you described. I’m not the best person to answer, I haven’t used Mint or Cinnamon since 2012.

4. File extensions are optional in Linux for some kinds of files. Linux usually tries to identify a file type using a “Magic string”, meaning it will read the first 8 to 16 bytes of the start of a file and will be able to tell with a great deal of accuracy what kind of file it is. Executables, drivers, shell scripts, and many others use this method and do not need a file extension. You can definitely still use extensions though. Eg, libre Office will still save documents with a doc extension (.odt). Often Linux will use a combination of both the magic string and the file extension to determine the file type. Eg, the magic string identifies it as an open office file, and the extension tells you it’s a document kind of office file.

Your Linux photo editor will still save images with a .png or .jpeg extension, because these are the convention (and may be required if you will be opening those files on a different OS). Similarly, your project files created on Windows will still work fine on Linux (if the equivalent Linux app supports that file format).

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don’t even know if you will like it, and don’t know if you want to learn it’s mechanics) then Arch wouldn’t be my first choice.

I bought a Miele S8 off marketplace about 5 years ago. After I bought it, I did some research and found the same thing you did. The S8 was the most powerful vacuum that Miele ever made, and used a motor made in Germany. After that model they replaced it with the C3 that is almost identical except uses a Chinese motor.

It mentioned in the article that Meizu already has a phone with capacitive pads instead of buttons, screen-based speaker, 18w wireless charging and no USB port.

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You might be interested in Raku. It is Perl6, or what used to be called Perl6, but it deviated too far away from the original perl and it ended up with a different team of developers than perl 5, so they forked it, changed the name and turned it into a new language.

Sounds like it’s actually a .doc file that has been renamed to a .docx for some reason. Real MS Word would probably still open it fine, but open source tools would fall over hard.

You mentioned you can’t decompress it either. If it was a real .docx you could rename the extension to .zip and unzip it with any archiver to see the contents. If the archiver complains about the format, then it’s not a real docx.

I haven’t used nano since I discovered micro. https://micro-editor.github.io/

Oh nice. I used lxqt a couple years ago while I was taking a break from KDE Plasma. I liked it, light and fast and simple. I didn’t know v2.0 is coming out, I’m definitely going to try it.

Another vote for outer wilds. Its weird how often it pops into my head.

Nobara is a good choice, it’s based on Fedora, and is maintained by Glorious Eggroll himself, it has out of the box features like proprietary driver installation, game mode, gamescope, etc. That’s what I run on my gaming PC and my HTPC, where my work laptop runs Kubuntu.

You’ve been autist-baited!

Trillium is a full featured configurable and programmable self-hosted note-taking app that can be easily configured to suit the use case you’re describing, it does categories, tags, links to other topics etc.

We use NoMachine at work too, for WFH users’ remote access to internal servers and virtual desktops. It’s a nice tidy solution, it was forked from NX library from the X2GO project about 10 years ago and went commercial, they used the commercial money to continue to develop the technology.

Given it was forked from NX/X2GO it definitely works better on Xorg than Wayland, it seems like Wayland support was added as an afterthought bolted on.

No, I thought it was just me!

Sounds like your friend is absolutely not the target audience for a linux-based operating system. If he wants to play Windows games and use software designed for Windows, then he should be using a Windows OS. Anything else would be providing a suboptimal experience for him.

Personally, I’ve been using various Linux-based systems since 2004, as a software developer I use a lot of command-line utilities, and many tools and applications designed for Linux. If I were using predominantly tools and applications designed for Windows, then I would be using Windows. No need to make life more difficult for yourself and others.

Well, that’s a dumb Docker thing, not necessarily a dumb Linux mistake. You could’ve made the same mistake on Windows or MacOS when running Docker.

I was smug thinking “I haven’t done anything so silly as the people commenting in this thread”, then I came across this one. I’ve actually done this one, and it was earlier this year, and I’ve been using Linux since 2004, 20 years.

BTRFS: yo dawg, we heard you like partitions, so we put partitions in your partitions, so you can mount it inside your mounts.

Same. This is exactly what I do. I’m on my 5th Android phone since 2009, and I still have all my call logs and SMSs going back until then, because I backup from my old phone and restore to my new phone on every upgrade.