I think I am in the SSD camp. I absolutely hate the latest trend on MS Windows to fill the title bar with various widgets to the point where it can be hard to grab the window and move it. As with the current trend in US politics to stretch the rules well past any previous deformation, give a CSD an inch and it will eventually lead to ridiculously-adorned windows.

… or the voice call feature will be deprecated due to the universal use of text messaging and advertisers will refuse to buy ads for a defunct technology.

Easy if you make assertions without citations. The lid appears not to be effective at spreading contamination. https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(23)00820-9/fulltext

Darwinism?

Personally I would have used a sarcasm escape: /s

Stable (Debian) means that when you get it working it is less likely to break when you update. A broken installation on a server is quite stressful. Downside for desktop/laptop is that it may not support the latest games and hardware.

Ubuntu is probably more stable than Mint, but less stable than Debian. Which you choose may be more personal preference than objective value.

Yes, but if you are happy with Ubuntu don’t worry about it.

• Open-source purity
• Stable
• Traditional
• Upstream sources for much of Ubuntu

This is why they invented emoticons and emoji. On the Internet, no-one can tell you are smirking unless you tell them

Web search engine of your choice.

Keep in mind that every open source project scratches a different itch… they don’t exist because people wanted to collaborate for collaborations sake… they exist because someone (or some people) wanted a particular software capability. This means that many of them started because one person had that itch, but there are millions of itches so the projects that need your help very likely won’t fit into a convenient “top 100” list. Think about what you are interested in and search for open source software related to that topic.

The best approach is to not run untrusted software. Second best is to be a security expert and run it under the control of a debugger and analyze each instruction before it runs.

This is probably not what you wanted to hear, but every sandbox has flaws and software that is written by someone aware of those flaws can conceivably exploit them.

Tools like firejail are often useful early to mid software life cycle… before exploits become common for them. But there eventually comes a point where a zero day exploit is released and your peace of mind leads you to think you are safe. Their utility varies over time, and it is the nature of zero day exploits that they surprise you.

I think flatpak is a configuration management tool… not a security sandbox… but really the question comes back to what is your use case… do you want to become a security consultant, or are you just looking for a bit more protection from common exploits? There is no magic bullet… even dealing with the minutiae of locking down specific system calls will not protect you perfectly yet it can significantly increase the hassle of onboarding new software. Simply relying on signed software packages most of the can reduce the chance of encountering malicious software significantly over using unsigned packages if you are an ordinary computer user… and getting wrapped up in security issues when you are not aiming to be an expert can just add overhead to your life without making you significantly safer. Beware of the rabbit hole… it can feed your hypochondria rather than protect you if you let the wolf in through the front door and hope the locks scattered around will stop it from harming you.

They told the same thing to the rocks on Venus.

seeing this will almost certainly top whatever stress she thought she had before.

Just because you have OS install media and hardware does not mean the hardware functions. In fact, old hardware often fails MEMTST.

Like when someone sends you a 500MB Excel file and M365 (32bit) on your 64bit work computer (where all your other apps are 64bit) won’t open it and IT doesn’t want to upgrade M365 because some add-ins they haven’t made a list of won’t work if they do?

Sometimes I just can’t excel…

I have no “proof of reality” to offer you (Plato had similar thoughts with his “shadows in a cave” analogy), but in all cases I have heard of pursuing these hypotheticals too far simply feeds neuroses rather than uncovering the Illuminati. The current US paroxysms of conservative conspiracy theories are IMO the product of failing to rein in such unproductive thought… do you really want to go down this road?

Your 26th century bit reminds me of the Continuum tv series. Entertaining story, but not likely to be worth building your reality on.

Trying too hard to get a reaction by threatening to load Windows, the hardware hog? Way too low to even be believable.

First thing that comes to mind with a thrifted laptop is that you need to use an older distro compiled for 32bit cpu. But honestly, modern laptops are cheap and the overall experience regardless of OS is that very old hardware is going to look bad by comparison with anything on a store shelf so unless you are familiar with Linux already and committed to rehab old hardware (e.g. for standalone use) then it probably isn’t worth your time.

That is not an ideal experience. However, hardware gremlins are not a universal experience either.

Others have pointed out that getting a slightly older laptop to put Linux on can give the tinkerers time to get the key drivers working, and avoiding bleeding edge revisions of your distro can help.

It is quite possible that my comfortable experience with Mint and Ubuntu over the years have been influenced by my low expectations of getting all the bells and whistles working the way they would in Windows. I like the software environment that typically comes on Linux and I don’t stress when Windows software (esp games) doesn’t work (though Steam makes a lot of games work anyway).

I did have to spend more time getting the bios and fingerprint reader straightened out on my latest laptop (Dell Inspiron), but Google and blogs walked me through it and the only remaining problem is that sometimes when the fingerprint prompt times out I have to use the password until I reboot.

Banach-Tarski may be relevant here… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

Cool analysis if you happen to have cylindrical onions and infinitely long knives laying around.

Isn’t it “any algorithm that would impress Dilbert’s Boss”? In the vein of “I don’t have to be faster than the bear… I just have to be faster than you”… /s