Web search engine of your choice.

Keep in mind that every open source project scratches a different itch… they don’t exist because people wanted to collaborate for collaborations sake… they exist because someone (or some people) wanted a particular software capability. This means that many of them started because one person had that itch, but there are millions of itches so the projects that need your help very likely won’t fit into a convenient “top 100” list. Think about what you are interested in and search for open source software related to that topic.

Sorta. If you put a FAT32 disk or sd card into a Linux system and mount it, it will ignore case because of the way the filenames are stored in that filesystem. However, there are a lot of important features you lose working on filesystems like that, so really it should be reserved for sneakernet with other operating systems.

Trying too hard to get a reaction by threatening to load Windows, the hardware hog? Way too low to even be believable.

First thing that comes to mind with a thrifted laptop is that you need to use an older distro compiled for 32bit cpu. But honestly, modern laptops are cheap and the overall experience regardless of OS is that very old hardware is going to look bad by comparison with anything on a store shelf so unless you are familiar with Linux already and committed to rehab old hardware (e.g. for standalone use) then it probably isn’t worth your time.

That is not an ideal experience. However, hardware gremlins are not a universal experience either.

Others have pointed out that getting a slightly older laptop to put Linux on can give the tinkerers time to get the key drivers working, and avoiding bleeding edge revisions of your distro can help.

It is quite possible that my comfortable experience with Mint and Ubuntu over the years have been influenced by my low expectations of getting all the bells and whistles working the way they would in Windows. I like the software environment that typically comes on Linux and I don’t stress when Windows software (esp games) doesn’t work (though Steam makes a lot of games work anyway).

I did have to spend more time getting the bios and fingerprint reader straightened out on my latest laptop (Dell Inspiron), but Google and blogs walked me through it and the only remaining problem is that sometimes when the fingerprint prompt times out I have to use the password until I reboot.

They are a record of the process of adding to the Linux kernel. Such background can be used to trace the history of contributions if those contributions turn out to have had malicious intent or were derived from code that came from sources that were not compatible with the GNU license that the kernel is released under.

It is not recursive though. A directory is a special kind of inode that enumerates file inode numbers and when that list changes then the contents of that “directory inode” change. But if /home/user/.bashrc is deleted then the timestamp for /home will not be affected because the timestamps are associated with inodes rather than directory entries (assuming no symbolic links are involved).

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/inodes-linux-filesystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inode

Just to second that, the model series is Latitude, not Inspiron. and yeah, the i5 processor options I got over the years beat the i7 on processing power. The Precision models are a step up, but not any kind of low cost and seem not quite as tough.

Bash is always there, and bash scripts and snippets are precise. Describing gui manipulations when the GUI keeps changing is also quite hard… what if the person you are interacting with has a 2-yo system and you have the bleeding edge? Even knowing which menu the settings are in can be frustrating for the helper.

Windows users (e.g. me at work) get grumpy when Microsoft starts changing the menu structure after keeping it consistent for 20 years and start thinking of powershell scripts to create consistency between our engineering workstations.

Oh! I know! I would have to first install them, roght?

They are text files. If there is anything weird about them it is that they are indented with spaces and if you are inconsistent with indentation they won’t read into the yaml import function, but I can’t imagine why vim or nano would have a problem with opening them. Maybe the ones you were using were not actually yaml.

Totally lost me. Why the hate on YAML?

If you want the job, go back. If they don’t want to deal with a fragile person then it is up to them to fire you. Next time just say “I don’t know” and keep flipping burgers.

Mint.

General pickyness: Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. For example, Android and Mint are both operating systems that use Linux, but the way you interact with Android is dramatically different than the way you interact with Mint.

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

There are thousands of programs for Linux… but you should be warned that relatively few programs run natively on both Windows and Linux. In some cases there are ways to run “Windows programs” on Linux, but in general such successes are special cases. If you absolutely must have Windows you can run it in a virtual machine… but you will most likely be happiest with Linux if you aren’t chasing after such things.

I use Windows for work because our IT department only supports that… but I use cygwin and wsl to get a smidgen of my familiar Linux tools that I use on my personal computers.

I stopped buying phones from carriers 15 years ago for this very reason.

Using sudo when it isn’t necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su… Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files… and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental “sudo rm -rf /” command.

Seriously… sudo is not a “habit” to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.

Noob question?

You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.