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.

And then get screwed over when you’re using another system without said alias. As I need to work on multiple different linux-hosts both as a selfhoster and on work I’d strongly suggest against aliasing any system command to something else and getting used to it.

Someone with more experience on sed or awk should chime in, but out of memory something like this (which MOST LIKELY WONT WORK, verify it before running it on anything important):

find -name *mkv -exec sed -e's/file=.*/file=' > {}.changed \;

That, at least in theory, reads every .mkv file recursively in a current working directory, finds lines that contain “file=<whatever><EOL>” and replace that with “file=<EOL>” and stores the output to <original filename>.changed.

Delete windows partition with your preferred tool and update-grub should remove the item from boot menu. Then, depending on your partitioning schema, you can either create a new partition in the empty space and mount it however you like or expand your existing linux partition, but options there depend on how your partitioning has been originally built and if you can leverage things like LVM or ZFS when expanding the usable storage.

And, while pretty obvious, make sure to only delete the correct partition and all data stored on that will be lost, so make sure you don’t have anything important on windows side of things.

Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I’d think it doesn’t compress very well. But if you don’t have enough storage it’s always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other ‘format dependent’ options.

That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it’s “only” 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it’s not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you’ll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it’s more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.