Relevant video about the problems with high capacity ssds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2i8wZCXDF4

If you like fedora as a base, you can install the Gnome version of fedora and install the Pop Shell. It has autotiling that you can turn on and off while you get used to it if you want. Its what I run on Nobara and it works perfectly fine for me.

https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

My thought is that these people think that their smarter than everyone else therefore they are justified doing anything they do. On the other hand, anyone with a billion dollars got it by making a whole lot of other people poorer. And they ate neither actually geniuses nor benevolent in any other way.

The Phillip Morris CEO makes money by hooking people onto something that isn’t good for them. Tech CEOs are very seldom any different. Anyone who says otherwise usually has a financial interest in making you believe them.

Maybe not that much more complicated, but it does give a less experienced user a lot more opportunities to make a mistake that could result in data loss or just a computer that suddenly decides not to boot Linux anymore since a Windows update broke grub.

The most important thing to do is backup your data to an external drive. Unless you are planning on dual booting (much more complicated) you will be wiping out the entire drive that has windows on it when you install Linux.

This guide goes through the whole installation process.

You’re absolutely right. Everyone will be very worried and talk about the importance of security in the enterprise and yada yada yada until a cool new AI spreadsheet software comes out and everybody forgets to even check if their firewall is turned on.

But with that being said, if you have been looking for a good time to ask for cybersecuity funding at your org, see if you can’t lock down 5 years worth of budget while everyone is aware of the risk to their businesses.

Octoprint is what I use. Slicing is probably the thing it woukd be least good at but all the rest is good. And theres an api to write plugins for if youre into that sort of thing.

I haven’t done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I’ve worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.

I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn’t changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn’t touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.

There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won’t know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a “magic make it work” checkbox during install.

That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn’t recommend it for new people.

You are correct that this is technically in code and would protect against shock hazards in a neutral error situation but you also get the opportunity for the outlet to pop during the day when nobody is home and the battery to die.

We had a situation in our old house where someone who was technically correct but didn’t think it through had a gfci outlet upstream of the refrigerator outlet. Thankfully it popped while someone was home and we got everything corrected before we lost everything in the fridge.

My big tip is if you haven’t already, switch to a local package repository. There are a lot of people mirroring the software packages for mint and you can switch to one that is geographically the closest to you for better speed and to spread out the server load.

I love Linux Mint and it’s what I install on all my decom-laptops turned servers. It will do pretty much all you want to do in Windows and then some. The only thing it probably isn’t the absolute best for is PC gaming but if you are just using a laptop it probably doesn’t make much of a difference either way.

If you like Mint then I also suggest PopOS. They are both based on Ubuntu so a lot of the paths and the package manager are the same. The killer feature there is auto-tiling Windows which is like the window snap feature in windows but happens automatically. It’s not for everyone but once I started using it, it changed my entire workflow.

Last thing is, if you haven’t already, familiarize yourself with running docker containers. A lot of stuff that’s complicated to set up is a breeze with docker and docker-compose.