SavvyWolf

For the swap space, yes that’s for when you run out of RAM. 48GiB is plenty of RAM, so you should be fine without it. I have 32GiB of RAM on my system and have been running without swap for ages without issue.

Hardening guides like that are mostly designed for things like web servers which are connected to the public internet and need higher scrutiny. The default configuration for distros like Mint should be secure enough for the average user.

However, don’t feel invincible and run random code from random sites. Both Windows and Linux can’t protect you against malicious code you run yourself.

Having organised partitions is the kind of thing that people obsessed with organisation do. For most people, the default partitioning scheme is fine. However, as always, remember to keep backups of important data.

For installing software, Mint has a Software Centre (which is distinct from the Snap Store). I’d recommend installing software using that for the average user.

In Mint, there are three main types of packages:

• Debian/APT packages, which are provided by Mint (well, technically by the Debian distro and they trickle down to Mint, but technicalities). Not all software is available from Mint’s repos and they may be out of date.
• Flatpak packages, which are provided either by developers themselves or dedicated fans. They are usually more up to date and have a degree of sandboxing.
• Snap packages, which are controlled by a company named Canonical. As of late, Canonical has been a bit “ehhhh”, so there’s pushback against Snap. Mint has it disabled and has their reasoning explained here: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html

Mint’s software centre is able to install both Debian and Flatpak packages. I’d recommend using it where possible since it allows automatic upgrades and easier installation/uninstallation.

It’s open source. If 32 bit support is important enough, people can fork and maintain it.

Don’t know if this is true for all environments, but you might be able to just create a file in ~/Templates for it to show up in that list.

Dual booting is fine. Bitlocker just makes it so that the installer isn’t able to resize the Windows partition (since it’s encrypted), but you can resize it in Windows to create enough space to put Mint on. You can also disable bitlocker entirely, but your files will no longer be encrypted.

There’s worry about the bootloader being nuked, but I think that’s a bit of an overreaction. Now everything is EFI, Windows shouldn’t touch other OSes. If it does, then that doesn’t require a full reinstall; it’s possible to boot from the live USB (the installer) and reinstall just the bootloader.

I don’t know if they still do it, but Mint used to do staggered updates (through their update manager) for some packages. They would start out making the update only available for, say, 10% of people and then slowly built up to 100% if no issues were discovered.

One thing that many guides tend to skip is how to install software. People coming from Windows might try to install software the “Windows way” by going to the website and downloading them. That is just likely to cause pain and suffering for a number of reasons.

Instead, every beginner friendly distro has its own flavour of software centre that users should be encouraged to use instead. Maybe even include a link to flathub in the guide or something.

Ubuntu 25.10 entered beta on September 18th. It releases on October 9th. It’s still in beta.

… Yeah? Beta software having bugs isn’t the hottest of takes.

I’m willing to bet that if the GNU coreutils getting bumped a minor version caused widespread issues for a day, nobody would even bother reporting in it…

Rust and C are the same “tier” of performance, but GNU coreutils has the benefit of several decades of development and optimization that the Rust one needs to catch up with.

This would never happen if it were licensed under GPL. /s

Is the only reason they don’t have AI because they just don’t have the resources to set up and run their own models and bots?

The preview is fetched from lemmy.world which is based in Germany and so Youtube serves German pages.

Exfat does not support permissions, so when it gets moved to the drive, that information is lost.

If permission information is important to you and compatibility with non-linux devices isn’t, you can reformat the device as ext4 to support all linux features.

If you’re itching to test Orion for Linux, you’ll have to wait. No public builds are available yet, and when testing versions do arrive, they’ll initially be restricted to paid Orion+ and Kagi subscribers.

If reading this has you itching to try it out, you’ll have to wait. No public builds of Orion’s Linux port are available for testing, and when available, the plan is to only give paid Orion+ and Kagi subscribers first dibs – crushing, but there is a reason for it.

Seems they didn’t give it a proofread before publishing. :p

Wasn’t that when Whatwg took over the spec?

So the narrative is that Rust somehow, through being released only through one distro, is going to use that influence to force incompatible changes into other codebases. Despite the fact that any change to shell scripts that isn’t posix compatible brings opinionated people out the woodwork. And then they’re going to pivot to releasing a proprietary version of coreutils that somehow has killer features that the open source version lacks despite coreutils being 30 years old.

Also the guy pushing for it once worked for a government so that means he can’t be trusted ever again.

It’s just a fucking bunch of programs that act as thin wrappers around C functions. There’s nothing novel that needs protecting or is hard to implement.

Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.

If you want to make absolutely sure that Windows can’t spy on anything, you’ll need to physically remove the storage device containing Linux when booting.

A more practical but slightly less secure approach is to enable full disk encryption on Linux. Then, if Windows does decide to get sneaky it’ll only see random data.

This doesn’t prevent hostile code such as ransomware from destroying the data though. For that, you need to have good backup hygene.

A good backup system is to have automatic daily backups to some online cloud storage provider, and weekly or monthly backups to a physical device you keep disconnected and safe.

… Wait, so does the dotfile thing mean the out of the box experience will be degraded? Why doesn’t someone just fork it and set the defaults to match the dotfile? And if it isn’t better, how arrogant do you have to be to think your theme and setup is worth a monthly sub?

Edit: Looking at the actual page, it seems that buying the sub doesn’t give you the same benefits as donating €5 or vice versa. For some reason.

Because people have conversations and then clickbait youtubers overexaggerate it.