You’ve gotten good responses already, but I just live and let live with Gnome’s Mutter & KDE’s Kwin. It’s worth mentioning that they’re both highly polished offerings. But I would also understand why one wouldn’t want to use either.

I use Firefox as I actually like it more, except for the lack of Chrome-style tab groups (in development). But it does seem like it’s mismanaged and I wonder what that means for it in upcoming years.

Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.

Wow who could have foreseen back doors getting back doored?

I know that it’s not their fault, it’s the small size of the team

This part is directly Telegram’s fault. If they cannot keep up with their moderation queue then they need a bigger moderation team. Preferably properly remunerated. There are news reports about how Facebook’s sub-contracted moderators work for these extremely shitty companies who track them based on how many reviews a minute they do, and which causes extreme psychological damage to the workers both because of the extreme content they have to see as part of their jobs and the bad working conditions they must put up with.

The only charitable read of this is the end-user bypassing controls on company-supplied computers.

Of course that doesn’t mean that they won’t also shove secure boot, hw lockouts, DRM, etc on regular consumer laptops as well.

Try running a command like vulkaninfo --summary.

Then try running VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json vulkaninfo --summary (alternatively, just try running whatever else it is you use that reports you only have lavapipe available). See if there’s a difference and if it finally reports the hardware being used.

I’m not a Mint user but according to this page https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_wilma.php

• Run the Driver Manager
• Choose the NVIDIA drivers and wait for them to be installed
• Reboot the computer

What is the GPU?

Vulkan drivers come as part of Mesa, which would already be part of Linux Mint. Unless you have an Nvidia GPU, or a GPU that’s somehow too modern for Mint 21.3.

I think arch peaked in its popularity in 2016 or so. It felt like an elitism thing was going on around that time that has 1. Faded off and 2. Been dispersed into other distros because as it turns out there are other good choices, too.

Besides. How are you going to become a rising influencer rehashing the same old takes as the prior generation of dorks? Can’t keep people coming with Arch is the greatest YouTube videos forever.

Give me the OLD CHASSIS and the OLD KEYBOARD and make every other component new. I’d be in heaven. I would totally love an absolutely up-to-date x220. And I don’t mean a razor-thin one. I mean a thick one that I can hold in my hand comfortably.

I totally get what you’re saying, but I suspect the OP is not going to be using this device full-time. Or even part-time.

I used ProtonVPN for years. I use MullvadVPN. Both are totally fine, in my experience. I left ProtonVPN because I couldn’t get port forwarding on Linux, and then less than two months after I did that Mullvad removed that feature, so that’s how it goes.

The one caveat to building is if you build a PC and a single component is faulty, you are now responsible for determining which component is to get the RMA done. That can be a big hassle. One time for me it was actually two different components that needed to be replaced by the manufacturers, and that was a pain to figure out.

I want to use global keyboard shortcuts with Wayland that can be defined in the application, not the compositor. This makes using Wayland much more difficult for me.

And I also want to use proper Flatpak file permissions, but for Flatpaks to stop generating fake stupid random file paths so that this common issue stops being an issue:

Come in and set the file path to my games directory in my emulator. It works fine. Come back a few days later and it loses all memory of games, because it is receiving a file path from a portal that no longer exists.

Whenever I encounter a project that is not hosted on GitHub, such as https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot I get totally delighted because navigating and browsing it actually works.

In GitHub if I am browsing the source code I now have to open it in a raw page without highlighting, because GitHub’s features absolutely gunk it up. I have no intention of ever putting a new project on GitHub again. Bad user experience, untrustworthy leadership, and bad values (I.e. Silicon Valley ones)

The answer to your question why is because I arbitrarily decided on that years ago. That’s basically all there is to it.

The answer to your file ownership problems I can’t answer, because I don’t have that happening. My files are mounted like so:

LABEL=BigHD /mnt/BigHD btrfs nosuid,nodev,nofail,noatime,x-gvfs-show,compress-force=zstd:1 0 0

It ultimately doesn’t actually matter because in many cases these things are convention and there is no real system-based effect. So while it would be especially weird if your distro installed packages into those directories, it ultimately doesn’t matter. Someone already linked the filesystem hirearchy. See how tiny the /media and /mnt sections are?

I put my fixed disks into subdirectories under /mnt and I mount my NAS shares (I keep it offline most of the time) in subdirectories in /media.

But what about cases where you wish to mount and share with multiple users?