It’s kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn’t Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it’s a social and/or political problem.

They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which eleijeep@piefed.social mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there’s still handful of users and project itself isn’t dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.

On a previous comment I didn’t mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.

It’s not really a same thing. I can’t reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don’t know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there’s no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.

And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I’m actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who’s willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.

See Jabber/XMPP for an example.

There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that’s the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).

Maybe in some version of the future we’ll get that back.

But it’s not ‘gaming’, it’s ‘learning’. And for all of those there’s plenty of walktroughs around if you get stuck. I’m currently playing the newest Monkey island and it has the spirit of old titles, but it has a ‘hint book’ where you can just practically skip puzzles you can’t figure answer for. That one relies heavily on the old games at the story tho, so it may not be the best one to start with.

But yeah, that might be a concern. You can try a lot of those out at Internet Archive before setting up a dosbox, so it’s atleast cheap to try and see how it goes.

Get old LucasArts SCUMM games for them. Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle and so on. With those you need to understand English for both understanding the story and to actually progress the game.

Scratch is good, but if you want something with a bit of syntax search for Basic256 (or any other basic interpreter). There’s also games like Autonauts which have basic programming in them (altough Autonauts gets pretty complex on higher levels).

I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name>

From top man-page global commands:

• k :Kill-a-task

       You will be prompted for a PID and then the signal to send.
  

You could try to ping your machine from another device and see if it responds. I had issues with older nvidia card on a old system where it would lock up keyboard/mouse and video but the underlying system was still running and I could ssh into the machine and debug the problem that way. Another computer is obviously preferred but in a pinch a cellphone is better than nothing.

One option is to pull the keycap off and paint over it. If you feel really crafty you can sand off the coating to make whole keycap translucent and use a stencil. Personally I don’t look my keyboard that much that it’d bother me and it’s made by microsoft anyways, their ergonomic keyboard is the best one I’ve used so far.

Since no one has yet mentioned, by default if you’re running tar as a non-root user it extracts files with owner/umask of the current user and if you run it as root (or superuser) it’ll preserve ownership and permissions. From tar man page:

–no-same-owner

Extract files as yourself (default for ordinary users).

–no-same-permissions

Apply the user’s umask when extracting permissions from the archive (default for ordinary users).

As mentioned, with root the defaults are to keep UID/permissions as they are in the archive. (–preserve-permissions and --same-owner).

Dad of 4 kids here, I would say use the system that let you concentrate more on the kid and less on tinkering the OS.

Dad of 3 here with 20something years on Linux already. This is the correct answer. Just go for win11 if that’s the simplest route for you, Linux will be there once you have the capacity to learn it. With a new baby you’ll be exhausted, you have a crapload (sometimes quite literally) new things to learn already and you just won’t have the time to do all the things you used to (as you already know). Making things more challenging for you by switching to something completely new just eats the very little time you have for yourself.

My work laptop has 11 running on it and it’s good enough. OS on that thing is not my call anyways, but at least on my workload it gets the job done.

You’re correct. All packages installed via dpkg/apt are on that list. What isn’t included are appimages, flatpacks, snaps and other non-dpkg software if you happen to have any.

And setting permissions on directories get’s them inherited by newly created/added files in there, right?

No. They’re created based on ‘umask’ and changing directory permissions doesn’t automatically change permissions on underlying files (unless you set privileges recursively) nor new files in the directory.

So how can i remove the ability from my homedir to execute current and new files but keep the traverse permission?

For new files set your umask on what you want. By default it’s usually either 0002 or 0022. For existing files you can use find: find ~ -type f -exec echo chmod a-x {} \; (remove echo once you’ve confirmed that it does what you want).

big begginer distros

I wouldn’t say that Mint is a ‘beginner’ distro. Sure, it’s beginner friendly, but it’s equally friendly for everyone. I’ve been a linux user for “a while” and currently I prefer Mint on my workstations. It offers me everything I need from a distro in a neat package and as I’ve been a Debian user since Potato it’s a familiar environment.

But if OP want’s somehting “more linux-y” then good old Debian should do the trick. Basically anything with decently long history besides Ubuntu (in it’s current state) will do just fine.

I think what just_another_person means that Lenovo, specially at the beginning when they got the Think-brand from IBM years ago, tried to ride the brand and released sub-par laptops under ThinkPad -brand. At least some of the L-series were closer to what you could get from your local supermarket than actual work machines.

The brand-riding is now greatly less and the crappy ones generally aren’t the models you can find refurbished from 3rd party retailer. I’m currently using T495 and it was ~300€ from a sale couple years ago, now you apparently can get L13 for less than that. And of course, when you buy used units do your homework and only make deal with a reputable seller, there’s always an option that previous owner didn’t treat the thing nicely.

The generic answer for this is to get a refurbished thinkpad. Pretty much any T-series fit your needs and there’s plenty of pre-leased corporate machines around which are refurbished and often have even a some kind of warranty.

Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel

Yes. Different distros have different versions, patches and so on, but the underlying kernel is the same.

if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian’s, the system will become Debian?

If by “userland” you mean files which your normal non-root user can touch, then no. There’s differences on how distributions build directory trees, file locations, binaries, versions and so on. You can of course replace all the files on the system and change distribution that way, a convenient way to do that is to use distros installer but technically speaking you can also replace them manually by hand (which I don’t recommend).

Over the past few posts I’ve set up a Windows VM with USB passthrough, and attempted to reverse-engineer the official drivers, As I was doing that, I also thought I’d message the vendor and ask them if they could share any specifications or docs regarding their protocol. To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips.

I’d recommend mint too, but testing stuff around with ventoy or just live-usb images is a good way to get to know what you like and what you don’t.

Official author don’t recommend it due to different semantics. But honestly for my own personal use case its fine for me.

I don’t recommend that either. If you get used to that ‘rm’ doesn’t actually remove files and then your alias is missing for whatever reason it’ll bite you in the rear at some point. And obviously the same hazard goes with a ton of other commands too.