Meh.

Their soapbox, their rules. You don’t like their rules, self host and make your own.

When I first discovered Linux 20 years ago, I was trying to get a computer up and running for my sister to use to write her homework on. The first distro I tried that mostly worked on that ancient Athlon proc was Ubuntu.

I wound up switching to Ubuntu from Windows XP on my personal computer because I liked that it didn’t try to hide anything from me. I could (and did, often resulting in me needing to reinstall) twist all of the knobs and dials of the OS. The entire world of software that was entirely free to use, that I wasn’t blocked from using because I was poor…was the icing on the cake.

About 5 years ago, I was gifted a new PC with Windows 10 preinstalled.and I decided to give it a try for a while and as long as I was only playing games, working on a text document, or watching Youtube, it was fine. But as soon as I tried to actually do something either sysadmin related or creative, it felt like the OS constantly fighting me.

WSL helped with the sysadmin stuff (mostly, but not with anything related to Windows itself) but if I was working on music, forget it. It was like working covered wet cement. I was always fighting the OS to do whatever it was I was trying to do.

I wound up wiping it and installing Linux on it after about a year of fighting Windows. First NixOS (which I liked) before going back to the distro I know best. Ubuntu.

For me, now, computers are not the toy they were in my youth. They’re a tool. The best tool for a particular job is usually the tool you already know how to use. I know Linux, I can’t say the same for Windows.

I’ve gotten old enough that I no longer have the time to study and really learn how everything in a new OS, or even new piece of software works. So, I stick with what I know until I run into a job that requires me to learn a new tool. Doesn’t happen often anymore.

Generally, it’s as simple as just deleting the Windows NTFS partition. I would leave the others for now. Depending on how you installed your distro they may be related to your Linux installation. Deleting them could prevent you from booting into your Linux installation.

I’m not as familiar with UEFI as BIOS, but I believe UEFI uses a FAT formatted partition for booting into the OS proper.

You may need to adjust the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS afterwards to get it to boot back to Linux afterwards, but that is fairly uncommon in my experience.

The most likely issue you might run into is accidentally wiping your active Linux partition instead of the Windows one.

I would make backups and have your distros install disk handy before you wipe the partitions.

Afterwards, you can resize your linux root to include the now free space or move your home directory to the new partition after formatting it. Your call.

:-D

I’m in no position to toss to much shade at the data hoarder community. I’m personally sitting on close to 64TB of media I’ve collected over the years. In my case, most of it legitimately acquired, either by myself or by family, but still. It adds up and most of it hasn’t been accessed more than once or twice.

So long as you don’t need to stockpile old shows you never watch, you can get by on an old laptop and possibly an external drive.

My homelab started out on a Raspberry Pi 2b. Most of the hardware Ive brought online were dumpster specials someone else didn’t want. It can be done on the cheap. Won’t necessarily be reliable, but it can be done cheap.

I’ve had mixed success with the open source drivers for printing. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. Just depends on the individual printer model. Newer models seem to just work.

Attached scanners though always seem to need their proprietary drivers to function.

Up side, Brother doesn’t seem to pack in any useless software with their Linux drivers.

Brother Printers have a well deserved reputation. They work. You will probably need their proprietary drivers (which you can get from their website), but after that they just work.

I know they make a .deb available, but I think there’s also a .rpm if you’re repping Redhat land.

With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.

If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.

Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.

Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.

Linux has run on ARM procs for some time. Software is a little hit or miss, but most things have a compiled build for it at this point. A lot of the big servers are running ARM processors due to potential power savings.

The popularity of the Raspberry Pi really increased the number of projects with ARM builds as well. It’s been possible to run a pretty decent desktop stack for 10 or 15 years. When the Pi2B came out.

If you happen to run across a project that is not available on ARM you might give a go at compiling it yourself. About half of the time it’s not too difficult and a good beginner project.

No. Just no. I trusted Google in the past. Never again.

Sure… I can. But why would I want to? The open source options are better in almost every use case. Adobe hasn’t had a compelling product for my use cases in decades.

Giving Adobe the middle finger isn’t worth putting up with their malware.

I fell it’s going to be a bad couple of months for everybody, not just Linux. It’s just with open source, it’s easier for the LLMs to find things that have been missed. And more open when they do because you can see the bug reports.

My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don’t like them RHEL is available for free for homelab’s by jumping through some hoops.

Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.

There have been many over the years. When I first discovered linux (shortly before linux 2.6 was released) it was RTFM (read the f*ing manual " and “each tool should do only one thing”.

I generally use micro on the terminal, kate or gedit in the GUI, depending. No hate towards the others, just what I’ve settled on over the years.

New York plans on enforcing that, how exactly?

My own opinion, they were too expensive and the EV charging network wasn’t built up enough to prevent people from feeling like the available range options weren’t large enough.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. If BYD were allowed to import their entire fleet to the US they would be at the top of my interest list on price alone even if the US prices were double what Ive seen in new articles.

I’m personally in need of a new vehicle and everything, both the pickups I need and the passenger cars, are too expensive and has too much shit I don’t need installed by default. I’m literally holding my car together with ducktape and bailing wire waiting for the Slate Truck to come out.

I think that if Slate Auto actually pulls off a inexpensive light duty EV pickup, and it proves reliable, it may completely change the landscape of the American auto market. I’m pretty sure that Ford and maybe Jeep will survive, but I’m not sure the others will unless they can start kicking out lower priced vehicles quickly.