SavvyWolf

For friends that I know, they can just ask me and I’ll give them a login secret. I don’t have the headspace to manage fedidrama.

Most actual Linux code changes come from large companies implementing or improving drivers for their own hardware.

The Linux foundation mostly manages the Linux “brand”. That is, all the logistics and infrastructure required to run a huge project with many stakeholders.

I thought we weren’t supposed to be using Mint anyways because it uses Systemd? /s

Emacs.

With all the vimmery going around nowadays though, I feel like I’m on the losing team. ;_;

Looks like a scam to me. It can do all these tests to find security issues, but instead of telling you how to fix things (or do it itself) it has you input it to an AI?

Yeah, GNU IMP. Recognisable and easy to understand for those familiar with the old name.

WLBR just seems like people being clever for clevers sake.

The problem with tools like this is that they don’t actually check that the mail is sent correctly. You can define security keys, but they don’t mean anything if your mail server doesn’t use them correctly.

For testing, I use https://www.mail-tester.com/ which you send an email to and it does more thorough tests on the server and email itself.

Especially with the newer ROCm 7.2.x releases improving hardware support and other improvements. Especially with the rate of improvements to ROCm recently, it’s unfortunate to see ROCm 7.1 shipped in the Ubuntu 26.04 archive.

Improvements!

But yeah, 3 months out of date for software that isn’t security critical is fine. Probably just hit the feature freeze at a bad time. It still presumably works well enough for most people.

I’d like to suggest Linux Mint: It allows you to use guides and software written for Ubuntu but disables all the scummy stuff.

24.04 to 26.04 is a big version jump and sadly they can’t check every combination of hardware and software. Some people don’t go through the upgrade process and just back up their user data and reinstall when they want to upgrade to a new major release. In my experience, the automatic upgrader is usually fine but occasionally requires me to tweak something on my system.

Missing Nvidia drivers

Ubuntu has a “driver manager” software in the settings which should allow you to install recommended drivers.

Python not compatible with software like Proton VPN

What version are you using and how did you install it? You might be using an older version of their app and the issues are fixed in the latest versions. If you really can’t get their app to work, you can go to https://account.protonvpn.com/downloads#openvpn-configuration-files and download an OpenVPN file which you can import in your network settings. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as their app, but it still allows you to VPN your traffic.

My pc is not welcome in the new Ubuntu world :’(

I mean, isn’t Windows notorious for breaking things after an update as well? :P Computers in general are brittle and don’t handle change well.

Doesn’t that cause issues if a backdoor happened a few months ago and you should be updating to a recent fixed version?

NixOS would beg to differ. :P

Tragic that they don’t enjoy any fun in their lives.

They aren’t available as regular boot options, so you need to use timeshift itself to switch to them. It provides a cli though so it can be used in cases where you’ve broken your x server.

I’m not sure if it’s treating “localhost” as a hostname or not, but does replacing it with 127.0.0.1 function as expected?

Even then, it’s possible that there may be small embedded circuits inside the camera with the sole purpose of constantly recording and sending that data who knows where.

You know, if you want to go full tinfoil hat.

I don’t know how available it is for other distros, but Mint has a gui tool called Timeshift that allows you to take and restore snapshots.

Snapshots seem an ideal tool for the job. It won’t replace a full backup system, but as long as the cost of failure (such as you mistyping a command and nuking the disk’s partition data or something) is only a few hours of OS reconfiguration rather than losing priceless family photos, it should work.

I use btrfs snapshots on my system. When I’m about to do something “risky” (e.g. trying out kde or cosmic) I take a snapshot beforehand. Then when I want to go back, I just restore the snapshot and reboot.

For /home, there won’t be a lot of OS configuration there, and if it’s a burner machine you probably won’t have much personalisation done on it. However, if you want to backup configuration there, look into a dotfile manager.

Depends on how much RAM you intend to use, and how much you need. For normal web browsing, I think probably enough swap space to make your total RAM + Swap amount up to 24GiB should do. If you have more than that and don’t run anything memory intensive, you can probably get away without any swap at all.

If you want the ability to hibernate though, you need at least the same amount of swap as physical RAM (since Linux will use the swap space as the location to “hibernate to”.

I think for an SSD it makes sense to use a swap file rather than a swap partition, since random access is basically free and you can resize it easily. That’s a minor thing though.

How much memory do you have? How much storage do you have? What will this computer be used for? Do you want to be able to hibernate?

I’ve been using Mint+Home Manager on my main desktop and NixOS on other devices.