Minimal delay between a program releasing new features or bugfixes and you getting to use them. Even as an avid Debian user, sometimes I get bummed out when they freeze a package for release right before a feature I would have really liked makes it in.

As for security, there’s not a huge difference I’m aware of. On Debian, features stay where they are, but maintainers will backport just the security fixes of each package to the current stable release.

Wouldn’t be too bummed out about being single forever, but I’d also like to know what it’s like to settle down with a partner. I think I’d prefer the married life, can’t point out the exact reason why though.

Some are assholes. Others have zero self-awareness. I stress about every little offense I might have possibly made, while astoundingly many others run around unaware that they are being jerks all day. I suspect the unnecessary playing of audio out loud in public stems from a very similar cause.

Confronting those who lack self-awareness is hard for those of us with excessive awareness, but it often gets the job done. Also a quick litmus test for who’s just unaware and who’s really an asshole.

Have you noticed this phenomenon increasingly often, or has it been much the same throughout your years?

Saw the followup post, glad to hear its all running well. I created my VM using virt-manager with a raw disk image and UEFI firmware rather than the default qcow2 format with BIOS. I keep the image size down to 32 GB to save time when imaging. Install proceeds as usual, make sure fstab mounts disks by UUID, Debian does by default in my case. When everything is configured, dd the raw disk image over to the target disk, do the rituals to make it bootable, and consider configuring new partition UUIDs.

Linux: no, but not necessarily plug-and-play. My daily-driver install is literally pre-configured on a VM and cloned to all of my machines with various motherboards. Nvidia complications aside, a default Linux install will contain nearly every driver you could ever need to get up and running. However, some motherboards do need you to chroot from a live environment and make it “aware” of the existing GRUB bootloader.

Windows: At best, you’ll need to reactivate. More often, it’ll be missing a driver or just not work as well as it did on the old motherboard. It’s better to reinstall Windows.

Will admit that I’m very biased against reinstalling Linux anew except as a last resort since it’s a painstaking days-long process to configure things just right for my picky tastes.

If you have SMR drives, it is normal for them to rearrange their contents during periods of user inactivity. The way Shingled Magnetic Recording crams more bytes into the same platter necessitates its own kind of “defragmenting”. Unless it’s host-managed SMR, it’s done by the drive’s onboard controller, so the OS won’t be aware.

No, the more the merrier, even if it’s pure publicity.

Primarily by having multiple email addresses and aliases.

I realized that on many occasions, I’m giving out my email merely as part of signing up for an account or resetting my password. So I made accounts and aliases that I use when I don’t forsee a service sending any messages of value after I sign up. I star the confirmation email for my records and ignore whatever junk mail comes my way, first-party or third-party.

As for the main personal email I use to actually communicate with people, my provider’s built-in spam filter has done a good enough job so far. If it misses anything, it usually follows a pattern (topic, domain, etc.) so I just make my own filter rule. In the off chance I do want messages in my main inbox from a service after I sign up, I do so with an alias. If that alias gets compromised, I just cut it off.

Granted, I don’t see much spam anyway since most of my email is work-related, my employer’s IT department seems to do a good job of filtering out spam, and I’m strict about not using my work email outside of work.

Probably not without LVM or an external drive to restore from. Depending on which partition comes first, you’ll either have to extend the OS partition “leftward” or lop off the front of the data partition, and there isn’t a good way to do either nondestructively.

If you have LVM set up, you could reduce the storage partition, make a partition in the new free space, and lump it into the volume group for the OS partition.

Sorry about that, you are right. The way I originally envisioned would have disrupted the partitioning of the original ISO. Tried it myself and ran into the same issue, then finally recalled how I actually did it. See my edited comment above. Unfortunately, changing out the ISO non-destructively might be harder than I originally thought.

Looks amazing. I was just thinking about my friend who keeps Windows around for iTunes syncing yesterday, one more thing I can suggest to people moving to Linux.

The only time I find myself in line with CLI purists is when I need to SSH into a machine without X forwarding. Had no idea that there were terminal PDF viewers, but now I know if I ever need to consult a document remotely.

My friend

• loves making and sharing home videos, but his entire workflow is tied to Windows Movie Maker
• his wife insists on using an iPhone and is tech-illiterate, so depends on him having iTunes for syncing stuff
• has bad memories of Linux from the 2000s and has grown comfortable with a copy of Windows that I’ve debloated

If you don’t want Ventoy:

1. Wipe the USB: wipefs -a /dev/sdb
2. Copy the ISO image to the USB: dd of=/dev/sdb if=/path/to/image/linux.ISO bs=1M status=progress
3. Make the data partition in the free space: cfdisk /dev/sdb, don’t remove the iso9660 signature, create partition in the free space, and Write.
4. Format the partition with filesystem of your choice: mkfs, cryptsetup, etc.

(everything as root, replace /dev/sdb with the location of your USB)

As is, this only leaves exactly enough for the ISO you are currently working with, sealing the fate of the data partition if you need to swap out the ISO. I suspect there is a workaround in theory, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

Also see https://github.com/thias/glim, a GRUB-based alternative to Ventoy, albeit with less compatibility.

Edit: this will not work with Windows ISOs and the data partition won’t show up in certain versions of Windows, in case anyone is wondering

You’ve survived and perhaps thrived booting off the HDD for a while, so I would wipe the SSD and install Linux there if you intend to switch over at some point. That’s what I did for my test bench, my last personal machine with Windows; Linux on an SSD and Windows on an old HDD, where the slow speeds don’t really bother my infrequent use.

As someone who did use this guide as an exercise in making my setup as secure as it could be without changing distros or hampering productivity, a few words of advice:

• Make a threat model for yourself before diving in and apply the mitigations judiciously. It’s not exactly a checklist, just use something secureblue or Qubes if you are really paranoid about your computer.
• The majority of the mitigations ‘just work’ and have no noticeable impact on performance, battery life, or compatibility.
• If your CPU/Memory performance widget breaks, dial back on the ptrace options
• If Flatpaks fail to launch, dial back on the namespace options
• Check back every so often because some of the options end up having unwanted side-effects with updates. See the preamble in boot parameters, where a change in Linux made in 2021 (which finally made it into Debian Stable this year) made the slub_debug mitigation actually worsen security.

reductio ad Hitlerum is analogous.

Age-old case of everyone else on the internet wanting you to be specific, but I’m open to the idea that you don’t exactly know what it is either and just need a starting point. I don’t know a thing about remedies for the psyche, but have you been taking good care of your bodily health?

Get some good sleep every night. That doesn’t mean the 05:00 grindset, but just something you can stick to every day, even if that’s getting up 90 minutes before your job or obligation if that’s what it takes to be consistent. Go outside for a stroll, however aimless, get your blood flowing and maybe bundle that with getting the mail or whatever. And perhaps eat well by cooking something you like, even something home-made that seems slightly indulgent won’t be as bad as the processed junk out there. Just things that will be good for you and will help you feel in charge of yourself.

Rollback is only possible after an upgrade from 10 to 11 but before the Windows.old directory (a snapshot of system files and configurations immediately before the upgrade) is purged. After that, a fresh install is the only option. No tool can claim to reliably downgrade Windows since 10 would not know how to handle newly-introduced configurations and data from 11, especially in the registry.

It’s there to protect you from crimes of opportunity. Like if your car is locked, a thief could decide to pick the lock, smash the windows in, or find another victim, but they would have no second thoughts if your car were already unlocked. The password deters a casual hacker and buys you some time to notice and deal with anyone seriously trying to break in.

In an ideal case of disk encryption and a well-designed lock screen, the password forces a would-be intruder to either spend lots of time guessing it or shut down the computer, thereby discarding the encryption key from memory and thwarting the attack.