Tell your buddy you can play Helldivers with him!

Helldivers 1 and 2 are platinum and gold rated on ProtonDB with recent reports on both confirming they work well.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=Helldivers

Yep, as for the last point: the problem was not so much the devs but data going through a Chinese server

If Mint works for you, just stick with it. No need to try a different distribution to compare. You’ll know when you need it.

I would only go to Fedora if you need it. For example newer drivers (kernel, mesa). Don’t go change the kernel and/or mesa on a distribution, probably better to switch at that point. Or if you need KDE or GNOME for some reason. Wayland is disabled in Mint by default, but can be enabled. It’s been over a year IIRC since they added experimental Wayland support so it may be fine by now.

Differences between Linux distributions are exaggerated.

Mint is a great choice, it is very stable, and it really holds your hand via the Software Center.

However, stable also means old: it does not support the latest hardware.

If you have hardware that released after (rough estimate) April 2024, consider something based on Fedora, such as Bazzite, instead. It comes with modern drivers and should support modern hardware much better.

keep it on cache since I do a lot of code compilation, but I will usually switch it to frequency for gaming and stuff.

Isn’t gaming the most cache-heavy CPU workload there is? The X3D CPUs have consistently topped gaming benchmarks, even outperforming much more modern CPUs that lack 3D cache.

I’d sooner do it the other way around: frequency for compiling, rendering, transcoding, etc. Cache for gaming!

The article says it can debug TUIs, similar to what the browser’s debug panel does for web apps. That is useful for TUI developers.

Other than that, I don’t know either what Kitty is missing.

Finally, the end of “it doesn’t work on Wayland” is in sight. Just in time for Windows 10 EoL too

… that there …

I’ve heard of SwayFX, but it’s pretty niche and I doubt it comes close to the featureset of Hyprland

Is privacyguides wrong?

While the company has a questionable record and a controversial business model, Brave Browser is an open-source browser with good privacy features.

If they don’t keep any private data on any computer that trusts their home network/wifi and don’t do taxes or banking on those, there’s no problem.

But if they do, I maintain that the analogy is correct: their unpatched machine is an easy way to digitally get access to their home, just like an unlocked door is to a physical home.

You keep using the word “maintenance”. All I’m worried about is not installing any security patches for months.

The problem that I tried to highlight with my “cherry picking” is:

• Running a machine with open vulnerabilities for which patches exist also “paints a target on your back”: even if your data is worthless, you are essentially offering free cloud compute.
• But mostly, a single compromised machine can be an entrypoint towards your entire home network.

So unless you have separated this Orange Pi into its own VLAN or done some other advanced router magic, the Orange Pi can reach, and thus more easily attack all your other devices on the network.

Unless you treat your entire home network as untrusted and have everything shut off on the computers where you do keep private data, the Orange Pi will still be a security risk to your entire home network, regardless of what can be found on the little machine itself.

No it is

https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/consequences-not-applying-patches/

And:

You’re allowing for more attack vectors that would not be there if the system were to be patched. Depending on the severity of the vulnerability, this can result in something like crashes or something as bad as remote code execution, which means attackers can essentially do whatever they want with the pwned machine, such as dropping malware and such. If you wanna try this in action, just spin up a old EOL Windows machine and throw a bunch of metasploit payloads at it and see what you can get.

While nothing sensitive may be going to or on the machine (which may seem to be the case but rarely is the case), this acts as an initial foothold in your environment and can be used as a jumpbox of sorts for the attacker to enumerate the rest of your network.

And:

Not having vulnerability fixes that are already public. Once a patch/update is released, it inherently exposes to a wider audience that a vulnerability exists (assuming we’re only talking about security updates). That then sets a target on all devices running that software that they are vulnerable until updated.

There’s a reason after windows Patch Tuesday there is Exploit Wednesday.

Yes, a computer with vulnerabilities can allow access to others on the network. That’s what it means to step through a network. If computer A is compromised, computer B doesn’t know that so it will still have the same permissions as pre-compromise. If computer A was allowed admin access to computer B, now there are 2 compromised computers.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/18nt1o2/for_individuals_what_are_the_actual_security/

I used to lose my keys all the time. I don’t want to spend so much time looking for my keys, nowadays I mostly just leave them in the front door, I rarely lock it and it works like a champ.

There is a reason why NixOS was invented 21 years ago. Reproducible builds are not simple in most packaging build systems.

And at your next job, at an employer who sees the value of FOSS and a nerd with strong Linux-fu!

How to call xargs is typically one of those things I always forget. The foreach alias is a great solution!

My current solution was to use tldr for all of these tools, but yeah if I find myself having to do a for each line, I’ll definitely make it an alias.

Luckily (knocks on wood) I almost exclusively work with yaml and json nowadays so I should just learn yq.

The closest to Mint in terms of:

• stability: only have breaking changes once every 6 months
• just-works-factor: shipping drivers and whatever proprietary code is necessary to have a smooth out of the box experience

That I know of, beside maybe OpenSUSE (have no experience with it) is Kubuntu 24.10. Yes apt will say weird things and you’ll want to uninstall snapd.

But Kubuntu 24.10, current latest, ships with Plasma 6.1. Current stable, Kubuntu 24.04 ships with Plasma 5 still.

But I assume you’re not a fan of the rolling release model like EndeavourOS (Archlinux based, KDE is the default). So if you want recent packages AND a versioned release model, that leaves only Fedora out of the distros I’m familiar with. They recently promoted the KDE version from a Spin to a full version beside the GNOME version.

But Fedora is much heavier on the FLOSS philosophy, and not as works-out-of-the-box as Mint or any Ubuntu flavor.

Debian isn’t, but it will take a long time for Plasma 6.3 to make it to Debian stable.

So yeah, I guess OpenSUSE may be your best bet EDIT: took a quick look, there’s a rolling release model of OpenSUSE called Tumbleweed. But you probably don’t like rolling release. And a versioned one called Leap. The current latest Leap version still ships Plasma 5 so that still isn’r nearly as recent as Fedora, which has had Plasma 6 in the last TWO versions.

It’s not just about speed, but also (battery) efficiency.

Even if you don’t notice the speed, if you are working on anything but a modern expensive laptop, you will notice the difference in battery draw between:

VS Code > NeoVim in traditional terminal > Neovim in Alacritty or Ghostty