If you’re new, IMHO you should be looking at the distro as a whole, not the DE specifically. Yeah, if you find one you mostly like but want to try other similar distros, it’s probably a good thing to stay with the same DE. However, it’s not something to get hung up on as distros often tweak the DE.
And to answer your question, Cinnamon. After years of distro-hopping, I’ve spent most of the past decade on Linux Mint.
When I open your link for radiotray-ng, it says, “ebruck released this 2 weeks ago.” You’ll also notice if you go to the Releases page, it doesn’t show the year for the current year, but does for past years.
There was a few months where Wikipedia was reverted to a very old version as newer versions didn’t meet their build standards. That has since been fixed.
Given how long this has gone on now, it’d probably be best to inform your community that you’ll be removing BLOBs from the source and for them to be produced during build otherwise this shadow is going to remain.
Many of the BLOBs are essential to allow Ventoy to work with Secure Boot. They are compiled and signed by Fedora and OpenSUSE. They definitely need to be better documented, but they aren’t reproduceable for good reason.
I agree with your reservation about Manjaro. However, you did get one thing wrong:
They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips…
That was Pop!_OS (unless it happened a second time??)
I too wish the developer would respond, but I don’t think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:
Because ventoy supports shim, and by extension secure boot, these files needs to come from a signed Linux distro. In this case they are taken from Fedora releases, and OpenSUSE apparently, as they publish shim binaries and grub binaries signed by their certificate.
And it’s not like it contains any sensitive information. I’m sure all your emails are just friendly correspondence with your pen pal.
Because why not 🙂
Because security.
That’s definitely a good place to start. You also might want to check out any local Universities/Colleges. My University had a bike shop that was basically a co-op, but it’s officially owned by the Student Union. I took a repair class and regret not continuing to learn by volunteering to work on their donated/salvaged bikes.
The other option might be looking for less formal repair networks. For example I know some groups have repair clinics every-so-often in local parks. Or even local cycling groups, or word of mouth. A lot of people are more than happy to share their passion for bicycles and maybe you can find a mentor.
You’ve gotten a lot of good advice here, however, I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Bike Co-ops. If you have one nearby, it sounds like that would be an ideal spot for you to work on your bike while getting advice from more experienced mechanics.
I’m not saying that’s good, but I feel like I’ve seen far worse. Like the ones that are just a pad of cement and a pole with a bus sign. There might be nearby businesses to indicate where people could go when they use the bus, maybe a desire path, but no actual pedestrian infrastructure.
And to be honest, I’m not a fan of sources reporting on themselves. Even if I considered this a reputable source (I have no opinion on it either way), I would want a third-party article.
I’m glad to see other people go into Linux for positive reasons instead of just hating Windows. What really got me was Compiz. Initially, it was all the crazy effects like wobbly windows, but soon I realized how much I liked the “Workspace” paradigm and then being able to customize things as much as I wanted. Then, the whole free software thing, distro-hopping, the great communities, etc.
I can’t find anything to anything to support their assertion that a E5300 is a “Pentium 2”, but the chip is from 2008, so it’s not relevant to your situation. Maybe they meant it was a Pentium from the Core2Duo time, but that’s still not a “Pentium 2”.
In addition to what other people have said about gdebi, I’m surprised it’s not there by default in Pop. I thought it was there in pretty much all Ubuntu-based distros (except where alternatives are used).
I totally get not wanting to use the terminal for this purpose. It’s pretty rare that I download and install a .deb, but when I do, it’s nice to just click it straight from the browser and not have to navigate to my download folder in the terminal. And given how rarely I download and install .deb files, I have to look up the command every time.
Nice try FBI!
I’ve been using Linux Mint Cinnamon for years now, after distro-hopping for a decade. I think there’s 2 main reasons Mint has stuck:
Cinnamon - I think it looks pretty while not being overly heavy (though I think that all DEs are pretty efficient nowadays, I’ll take all the performance I can get out of this 14-year-old ThinkPad x201). It has good features while operating fairly stable. It’s also stable in that there’s few drastic changes.
Ubuntu, but slightly better - I like Ubuntu, and used it on-and-off for years (Warty through at least Precise), but Ubuntu’s made a lot of drastic changes over the years which messed with my workflow. Other changes I just disliked (ex Snaps), and I feel like they keep trying to force these changes on users. Whenever something’s hard or impossible on Mint, I feel it’s a technical challenge, not the distro actively preventing me from doing it. It’s nice to have a Ubuntu based distro because most instructions found online Just Work™.
It’s all Ext4, but I run SnapRAID on top of that on my data drives. I’m sure lots of people would tell me I should use ZFS/BTRFS instead, but I’m used to SnapRAID, and I like the idea if something goes wrong, I won’t lose all my data.
Oh, I don’t disagree. I’ve definitely done some of that. I think I installed i3 or awesomeWM back on LM19.x/20.x. However, this is a guide that says things like, “For a smooth and trouble-free installation”. It seems to be aimed at a general audience when I think those people should just be re-directed to a KDE-distro.
Replacing an SSD is pretty simple on Linux; just copy over the data, adjust the partitions, select the new drive in UEFI/BIOS. If you want to try a different distro, any time is good, but a new SSD doesn’t require a reinstall.
My advice from my distro-hopping days is to dual-boot with potential new distros (unless space is at a premium). I just made sure to share important folders like /home/. That way, if I didn’t like my new setup, I could quickly fall-back to the old.