I’m not a big fan of the Gnome DE myself, but I hear it’s the best choice for tablets and touch screens. Perhaps you could try a distribution that uses Gnome by default like Fedora or Ubuntu (or you could try installing Gnome on another distro).

Yeah, ideally the Mint installer or Driver Manager or whatever would be smart enough to tell you “some of your hardware is not supported by the default kernel, click here to install a kernel that will support your hardware”. This is definitely a shortcoming in Linux Mint.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that it is possible to get Mint running right on most hardware without touching a terminal.

Personally I’d recommend a beginner try running Mint or another stable distribution with a newer kernel before trying some sort of cutting edge rolling release, which might be buggy. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

It’s possible to install a newer kernel in Mint using the Update Manager. This might have solved your hardware issues. Admittedly, though, this option is not very easy to find if you’re not aware of it.

Linux can be all colors in the rainbow (white) or no colors at all (black). Linux is black, white and everything in between.

I don’t think that’s the whole story. Like with all of their products, the primary goal of big tech here is to maximise engagement. More engagement means more subscriptions. People are less likely to keep talking to a chatbot that tells them they’re wrong.

The situation would probably improve somewhat if AI companies prioritised usefulness and truthfulness over engagement.

Depends. If you use Google docs or the browser version of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called now) you’ll be fine. If you want to use an offline document editor, you’ll need to be technical enough to understand the difference between file formats like doc, odf and pdf.

If you receive a doc file, edit it in LibreOffice and send it back, the recipient might complain that the layout has shifted slightly.

If you need to be absolutely sure the recipient gets the document layed out exactly as you created it and they don’t need to edit it, exporting to pdf is a good option.

If you need to send or receive Excel/spreadsheet files you might have a bad time, I think. Though interoperability there may have improved since the last time I tried that sort of thing.

Before switching to Linux, download the Windows/Mac version of LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if it suits your needs. If not, it should be possible to run Office 365 on Linux using Wine or Winboat. However, Wine might not work or require too much tinkering for the average noob. Winboat should be more foolproof, but will increase the startup time of the application because you’re running it inside a Windows VM.

Dead satellites do add a much larger risk than satellites that can be steered, sure. If we stopped steering all our satellites right now, I believe it’d only take a few days before a collision occurred.

However, every satellite in orbit adds to the risk, especially if a chain reaction starts happening and it becomes very hard to avoid the shrapnel flying around. Or if a once-in-a-century-type solar flare takes out a bunch of satellites.

Edit: Basically, the best way to prevent Kessler Syndrome from occurring, is to keep the number of satellites in orbit below the threshold where it could occur.

There’s another problem that nobody mentions. Putting thousands of additional satellites into space would seriously increase the risk of Kessler Syndrome occurring.

Better to use winget, though. That way you don’t even need to bother with Edge’s initial setup screens.

I’d suggest getting Linux Mint or another distro with a large user base like Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse or Debian. That way if you do run into problems, there’ll be a lot of people online that can help you.

The main advantage of gaming-focused distros like Bazzite is that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers and Steam come pre-installed. However, if you’re a gamer and a streamer, you’re probably used to a little tinkering, so you should be able to install both of those by hand. (Both can be done through a GUI.) You might also get marginally better performance from these, but IMO this won’t be noticeable enough to be worth the trouble.

If you do choose to go with Mint, I recommend installing the Nvidia drivers through the “Driver Manager” and a newer kernel through the “Update Manager”.

Why not both? ROX Filer allows me to select a number of files and then apply a terminal command to all of them. I think that’s really neat.