Securing the desktop protocol against keyloggers on Linux is like wearing a helmet when you’re walking down the street… yeah in theory it’s a good thing and would improve your safety, but it’s also wildly impractical and the things it protects you from are extremely unlikely.

And even if keyloggers were a huge everyday threat, you still have to allow for legit explicit uses of the technology (automation, accessibility etc.) But nah, they just said “we’re not implementing it at all”. What sense does that make?

Wayland on its own may be ready but you can’t build a whole desktop with just Wayland. The rest of the stack needs time to catch up.^(*) And no, not everybody is willing to use KDE and restrict themselves to whatever combination of elements happens to work right now.

^(*) Because the bright people who did this decided they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater on X. They couldn’t possibly find a way to ditch only the obsolete parts and fix the problems and maintain compatibility as much as possible. No, everything had to be rewritten from scratch.

So here we are 15 years later, with another 5 or so to go until the whole Linux desktop ecosystem will be thoroughly redone.

It’s a dumping ground for new packages. Nobody makes any guarantees about it. It’s supposed to be used only as a staging area by developers.

It may happen to work when you install it or it may crash constantly. You don’t know.

If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.

Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what’s wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.

At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say “oh, it just broke” and leave it at that.

Windows hasn’t but the command prompt they put on the ISO could still be DOS. It’s perfect for this use case, it’s single process and lightweight.

Can anyone help me understand what any Mastodon instance can possibly stand to gain by federating with Threads? The size disparity is absolutely massive. Anything going to Threads will be lost like a drop in the ocean and anything coming from Threads will be a deluge that drowns anything on Mastodon. You can limit your instance to only one of these but it’s still bad.

Following Threads posters from a Mastodon client sounds ok at first, your users can get lots of Threads content, they get accustomed to it, and one day Meta changes the protocol and now you have to decide if you’re a Mastodon or a Threads client. Or your users start wondering why they’re using a subpar Threads client when most of their content is on there.

The command prompt to be exact. Which is presumably a version of MS-DOS. Which makes me wonder if you can’t simply boot MS-DOS or FreeDOS — assuming you can find a copy that boots under UEFI. It’s certainly lighter then a whole Windows iso and you can include the firmware with it on a tiny FAT partition.

Are you being serious right now?

Giving Arch to a complete beginner is like throwing a non-swimmer into the pool.

Also try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). I think it’s their best flavor actually, but not enough people know about it and usually only try the regular Mint.

You can also run many distros “live” from the install media without installing anything, to get a feel for them and to check that mosts things work (network, sound, movies etc.) You can make a bootable stick and choose the live option when it boots.

EndeavorOS. It’s based on arch

So, do you hate OP or what? They may get over the installation easier but then what?

Typically all of us who switched our relatives to Linux were doing support anyway — but it’s much easier than Windows.

Windows needs constant handholding like a needy pet (and not the cute kind). With Linux I spend extended periods of time without having to do anything. I get like one major issue a year, and it’s usually hardware related. The only questions I get occasionally are “do you know an app that does thing”.

Well yes but it’s a CMS (loosely speaking, actually a blog with CMS features). You’d have to add… everything to make it an online shop.

At a bare minimum you need a complex database structure to support products, stocks, orders plus the pages for browsing, searching, shopping, ordering, tracking, then you need user accounts, integrations with payments and shipping, a transactional email service etc.

There are WordPress plugins that attempt it but it’s usually more for people who use it mainly as a blog/CMS and want to sell a couple of things on the side. I wouldn’t use them for a large shop.

In actually curious what OP means by “similar to WordPress” — what feature of WordPress they need in their shop?

You don’t have to edit the config files, if that’s what you mean. Generally speaking you should never need to edit any of them except in very unusual cases.

The config files are generally specific to apps and they can get transferred between distributions.

It’s actually common practice to take your /home with you too a new distro, it to put it on a separate partition so it’s still there after you reinstall the system partition. The app versions might be a little different and sometimes they’re may be small glitches when you do that but for the most part it works very well.

The only dot dirs you might care about is .cache which you may want to empty every once in a while (if you run out of space on /home). There’s also trash, if you use that, but that usually has its own widget on the desktop so you can explore or empty it.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 6) might also be a good fit for you.

Debian Stable is on 6.1.

You can resize partitions in Windows so one way to do it would be to shrink the NTFS partition with the media files from the Windows disk manager, then use the free space in Linux for an ext4 partition, copy the media files, then use GParted in Linux to remove the NTFS position then move and resize the Linux partition.

Of course this is quite convoluted so the safest would be to copy the files to another disk while you wipe the other one and format in Linux, then copy back.

I’m saying that your problems are with AUR not Manjaro. It’s entirely possible you stumbled across some AUR packages that at a given time didn’t play nice with the official packages. The AUR is huge, it can happen.

But it could have also happened on Arch proper, two weeks earlier, no? The official packages were the same at that time.

I think you were put off Manjaro because it happened while you were on it and if you were to try again it could be different. But once we catch a bias against something it’s hard to revisit it.

I’m biased against Ubuntu and love Debian, for example, even though I realize that my issues with Ubuntu had to do with the way .deb repositories work and could happen with Debian, or that done of the things I disliked were just defaults that I could (and did) change.

Ultimately it’s as much a question of chemistry or vibing with a distro as with anything, and sometimes it helps to move to another distro even if they’re closely related under the hood.

If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.

Subscribe to things with personalized individual aliases instead of your main address.

That way you don’t get much spam to begin with because they’d have to guess what aliases you use, and you reject anything that’s not sent to one of those aliases.

Assuming one of the sites you subscribe to sold you out or was broken into and their alias starts receiving spam, you simply block or disconnect their alias.

If you haven’t been doing this, the address you use now (for everything) is undoubtedly on many spamming lists. It’s best to get a domain and start moving subscriptions to aliases on that domain.

Nobody should ever know the main account address, it should be reserved for logging in to the account. Even friends and family should be given aliases (because their address books and contact lists inevitably get sold and compromised eventually).