Thanks! Also will try to find info on that upcoming one.

Indeed seem to be few to me too. But I wonder elsewhere, like a Japanese Piefed instance and a S. Korean Mastodon instance I found before.

Been some years since I last used Fedora, so not able to confirm nor deny anything. Sorry for not being able to help further. =/

Dunno what sort of setup you have, but what I would do, considering my setup and by being a tad on the neurotic side, is to unscrew and detatch any drives but the one to be flashed. This, I think, is the only way to be absolutely sure nothing goes in the wrong place.

If you mean different physical drives, I would suggest detatching the drive with the already installed system when installing the second one.

Also, Linux installers may behave differently from one another, so I would suggest testing on another machine if possible, or at least backing up what you cannot afford to lose in the current machine, shrinking the Windows partition with its native partition manager instead, and picking a system whose installer can spot the correct partitions, maybe e.g. Mint with its option to be installed alongside an already installed system, or Endeavour which, from what I remember, can detect empty partitions.

Also if during install, grub is not set up to have both Linux and Windows as start options, there is a grub manager on Linux too, so that can be salvaged.

And lastly, a word of warning, and reiterating a past point, testing something as big as a dual boot in a computer with sensitive and already existing data is playing with fire.

Tried flashing an USB stick and putting the system ISOs in the stick afterwards?

On not finding anything, see if OpenSuse has anything like apt-cache. On Debian-based systems, it helps a bunch, as it looks for packages (programs) containing in the name or description the keyword you are looking for. Regarding messing the installation, making back ups periodically and keeping the more volatile stuff you do not want to lose on different physical drives could help.

There’s what sounds like a xylophone at the beginning of Sabaton’s Inmate 4859, but only with a good sound out I could hear a reverberation to it that sounded like it was being played within an empty room made of concrete/stone. Considering the theme of the music, it makes the song sound even eerier.

On Mbin instances, it joins 1:1 posts together. Maybe something to ask for the Lemmy engine devs to add?

If you’re sticking to Firefox-based browsers, Waterfox seems to be the fork closest to Firefox without being controlled by Mozilla.

If anything can be salvaged, I’d suggest backing those up, and then proceeding to make a fully fresh install. That will ensure you don’t come across issues inherited from the previous blunders, and also, I think, will give you the chance to take the same steps, but wiser than before, and so able to avoid the issues you either caused or came across. (Also something I’d recommend maybe around every 1~2 years, precisely because of being able to restart but wiser)

I’m more biased against Google than against Microsoft, and as mentioned in another comment, the search engines are proxies of the respective companies, so it’s hard to give an objective opinion.

Now, what I would suggest, trying to be as neutral as possible, is to test both and see which fit your needs more. After that, use mainly the better one and keep the other as a fallback option.

Never paid much attention to that feature, but it sounds similar to microblogging, e.g. Twitter’s posting system. And given that, maybe you’d be interested in checking Mbin (has Reddit-like UI/UX), Piefed (dev says microblooggin is in the roadmap), Mastodon (Twitter-like UI/UX) and/or Misskey (also Twitter-like UI/UX)?

https://thebrainbin.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/563178/Some-quasi-features-for-Mbin-through-Ublock-Origin-filters

(edit - weird, the link isn’t appearing directly on The/Brain/Bin…)

On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because “it just works”, I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy’s functions.

Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:

• Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
• But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
• On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it’s version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title’s attached link instead
• However, Mbin doesn’t seem to be able to fetch the post’s body through RSS
• On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
• On Mbin, afaik, you can’t block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
• On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don’t host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
• For microblogging, RSS doesn’t work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
• On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn’t
• Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
• Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn’t

On theming, akin to Linux, I don’t think there’s much room for breakthroughs, or at least they’d be harder to achieve, being more a case of picking the “flavor” you want instead. Furthermore, I think this applies to UI as a whole in social medias, federated ones included.

Now, one thing that annoys me and I think that falls on branding is how most of the federated platforms don’t have proper names. As I follow communities and people primarily by RSS, I like things to be organized, and having to figure out how to fit “names” like kbin.social (RIP), lemm.ee, feddit.uk and the sort is a bit of a migraine. "<.<

No one cares about servers

I’d like to see the source for that.

And even if it is/was true, looking at what came before, you’d just be paving the path to become that which you were against.
If one is to depend on a single element, when it fails, it becomes the failure point for the whole ecosystem. Like with the instance I originally stuck to, Kbin.Social, where, if was the sole instance of the federated forums, when it died, the “fediverse” as a whole would have died overnight.
Also, a centralized platform is far easier to be taken over by either good or bad actors, and at least with fragmentation, when you notice degradation in one of the pieces of the fediverse, you can easily jump to a platform that hasn’t been compromised while not having to build the community and groups from scratch.
Sites with specific niches and scopes that still allow for integration, and the culture that ensues, are also an alien concept on a centralized site, and what takes over basically becomes the face of the site’s ecosystem as a whole. With the federation/defederation system, however, it’s much easier for a site to build its own ecosystem while letting in and out just enough of/to other instances to oxygenate it.
And lastly, like with email and Linux, while some may be rather passionate to defend it, I think that, despite that, it’s still a technology, or at least an idea, with great potential, even if slow but constant, as, once more, anyone can make instances in their own vision, or join a platform that better fits what they need while not making a walled garden to force users to stick to it.

Does Mbin count? =P

Jokes aside, imo, Skyrim, Starbound and Final Fantasy XII are great games to sink a long time. Of those, Skyrim I played the least due to life happening, but was enough to sink a few dozen hours already. Starbound easily surpassed the 600 hours for me, even if I barely use mods or played multiplayer. And Final Fantasy XII, on my first save I got to the final boss, I was nearing 300 hours already, and for a game originally on a 4.7 GB disc, it has a lot to do, so much so that, in that save, I was just starting to scratch past the surface.

Regarding wonky links, I can’t say I’m familiar with the issue. You could try checking Mint’s desktop files to see how the commands are set up, and if they work fine manually through the terminal. If they don’t, that’s probably an indication of where the issue is.

Regarding videos, those are… problematic, some times even on Windows (FF Type-0 and Mary Skelter PTSD intensifies). Perhaps you’re missing a drive, or Proton’s equivalent of winecfg may need some manual tinkering.

And regarding auto-mounting drives, are they being automatically mounted to a static path, and before Steam is loaded? Also maybe deactivating Steam’s auto-start, if it’s active, helps?