Yep, completely agree. We only (really) learn when we make mistakes.

I usually aim to do my “first” (of whatever) as best I can, but totally prepared to wipe & restart…

🤭

Well… of course only time will tell, but the fact that we’ve been doing that for sooo long… (me for ~20 years?) would imply that it might just be around for longer than snap/flatpak/etc

Of course, sometimes it’s disguised as yay -S…

I’m struggling with what appears to be buggy wifi on an old Lenovo laptop… I spent a moment just looking at the logs and appreciating whoever has spent time and energy trying to get this working, probably reverse engineering without any support… I wonder if that was Larry…?

Link aggregation

+1 for warpinator

But if you had problems try https://pairdrop.net/

Anything that’s not an HP…

I don’t know what it is with them, but I always have problems with their hardware - generally. Printers, laptops, anything…

But I definitely +1 all the Dell comments

It’s similar failure to what Flathub does on their site too

My understanding is that Mint is just following Flathub’s classification, so it would be identical…?

And (would need to verify when this version is released) some of those apps are available without Flatpacks anyway… (ie VLC for example), so I’d expect those to still be available

I don’t see this as a big issue…

There is a CLI for VLC… just sayin’…

There is a CLI for VLC… just sayin’…

It’s not like the AUR packages need recompiling after every update, so I’m using standard Arch repos + AUR and that’s it.

Everything will be using the same (bleeding edge) dependencies, so if something breaks, I can find what changed and fix it and / or roll-back and / or report it to the dev.

I’ve been down this whole scenario with Windows back in the day… DLL hell, InstallShield packaging, compiled zips, weird %PATH% sets for execution, the lot… and at the end, it’s always simpler to use common libraries and work with the devs to fix bugs - after all, they’re usually developing on a “normally” packaged system anyway.

Came here to say this too… I contribute a few €/£/$ per month to various projects…

I won’t get all righteous here, but just because you don’t have to pay, doesn’t mean you to say you can’t support the developer(s)…

Yeah +1 for Parted Magic - I’ve been using it for years, professionally.

Has hardware stress testing, SMART checking, etc.

It costs actual money, but that’s the fee for creating the whole thing, which I’m fine with… I could make something similar with a Live USB distro (I use Arch btw), but Parted Magic can run entirely in RAM, so after booting you can remove the boot stick - useful for machines with only 1 USB port - and I’ve not worked out how to do that with my own DIY live distro

Clonezilla has been my goto backup / restore solution for years. I’ve used it on everything from RaspberryPi SD Cards to a Dell Poweredge server with PERC RAID controller (because some fool setup the wrong RAID parameters).

I didn’t know about Rescuezilla though… so thanks for that.

+1 for just mentioning squarepusher

Only Coke is the Real Thing

Ooh, didn’t know about that one… thanks

Excellent breakdown of history there

This is a really good point - us “believers” probably don’t glance at the negativity because we know it’s (generally) incorrect, but how others perceive it can be hard to convince if all they read is negativity.

Consider that most people know a laptop runs an OS, so they can distinguish “Dell” from “Microsoft”, so I’m often baffled why people stuggled when moving from WinXP to Vista / 7 (ie a whole new experience… and often asking where to get a hacked version for free), but when I suggest putting <insert distro here> then they run away.

Maybe not watching it per se, but it’s nice to catch a problem before I reboot (ie a grub upgrade failure for example)