Makes sense. Thanks for the details.

Yes, I understand this point. LMDE is the backup plan, but is it actually inferior to regular Mint based on Ubuntu? If not LMDE could be default Mint.

If your current distro works, there’s no reason to switch. Switching means a fresh install, repeat whatever customization you want or need, restore your backup. It’s not difficult, but can be time-consuming until you have everything configured they way you want it.

I wonder why they make both Ubuntu and separate Debian based Mint. That duplicates the work.

I would probably jump from ubuntu to mint if they drop ubunutu in favor of debian. But then, debian itself is a perfectly fine distro and i could also use it directly.

Too much choice.

It’s possible that Tailscale (SaaS) or Headscale (completely oss and self-hosted) work for you. This is a vpn based on the wireguard protocol with additional magic. While TS will always attempt to create a wireguard tunnel over udp, it can fall back to HTTPS if otherwise the connection cannot be established. If your motivation is to work from a network where only TLS is permitted this could do.

Tailscale has an Android client. GUI.

This is something that a web designer / developer does. It’s not a Firefox feature or controlled through user settings. However, you are right, that one could probably make an extension that overrides the original setting and forces a different behaviour.

I didn’t know this, but Oracle is shity in so many ways.

Debian is fine distro and many people rely on it as strong foundation including the people that build ubuntu and mint. Maybe Debian is the hidden champion.

When Ubuntu became popular, it had some advantages like reliable release cycles, slightly newer packages, better integration of proprietary drivers. Stuff that was not wanted in Debian stable main at the time.

Other non-debian-based distros also brought some advantages.

Personally, I’d love to see Debian as the base distro with Mint, Ubuntu and others building ontop of it. I like my apt update. I just won’t send novices straight to Debian when the derivates have more desktop users.

How to install Linux software using GUI?

On your GUI Desktop Environment, you use your GUI Application Launcher to start the GUI Terminal emulator. Then you simply type “apt install foo”. Easy.

See, the GUI is not harder then the normal way.

Well, if you prentend iterm does not exist, you can probably still use a mac to browse the web.

5 years in the EU

If this means the device is usuable and reasonably secure for 5 years, this is fine.

Other than avoiding ecosystem fragmentation, I’m not seeing tangible benefits of running the latest android.

Fairphone?

Just get a list or phones with replacable batteries. It’s a short list and you sort by price if more than one fits your need.

You don’t have to switch if you like what you found. Some people distro hop, some stay on the same one their whole life.

Too answer your question: Keeping your data is not hard and you should have a backup. Keeping your configuration/customization is a different story; if you don’t like the defaults, the tweaking is practically lost when you swap distros or DEs.

Too address the elefant in the room: Those beginner-friendly distros (e.g. Mint, Ubuntu, …) that you “start with” are actual full-fledged Linux distros under the hood. They usually try to create a UI that’s easier to navigate for someone switching from Windows (rarely from mac) and have a friendly community. They are opionated on some design choices but otherwise 99% identical to the underlying generic purpose distro.

Ubuntu is based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu. Most Everything build for Debian will also work on Ubuntu or Mint. If you like Mint and it works on your hardware, there’s no objective need to switch to Debian (or Arch or Gentoo) ever. People switch as a learning exercise or for bragging rights.

The main purpose of trying different distro is to find your style. Experts could probably configure Debian to look and behave just like Mint, but it’s easier and more consistent if you get it all of the box.

Third-party email clients would work if not blocked for employers configuration.

Teams works on Linux and i think OneDrive is technically webdav. I avoid mixing Microsoft and Linux, but i believe the modern (web) applications should work everywhere.

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing-fork-is-no-longer-available-on-github/25661/160

Not sure i would call this drama, but I’m still confused.

I’m on version v1.30.0.2 of Syncthing-Fork from f-droid and i have disabled updates for now. I need a reliable source and preferably no battery issues.

You can create a VPN through HTTPS. Bad idea performance-wise, but it’s harder to detect.

Well, what we mean by “on the same network” maybe more complicated then it sounds if a device has multiple network interfaces and a non-trivial routing such as any modern smartphone that smartly switches between wifi and cell. It’s plausible that various apps and devices have a different behaviour which network they treat as local/standard.

However, I just tried it out with two Samsung Androids. One is a hotspot and has no other wifi. The other one uses the hotspot (and no other wifi obviously). Then lauching pairdrop, they can “see each other” (through broadcast packages I assume) on the local network. During testing the hotspot device had internet access through 5G, so both devices could reach paridrop.net, but I believe, this is not needed while in local network mode. At least the file transfer itself should not go through the internet in this mode.

I had similar a similar experience with syncthing. Sure, the hotspot is a hack and neither super reliable nor super fast on most phones, but at least my phone does not seem to block access from/to the hotspot device.

Is this really a showstopper? You could use a hotspot.

Just dropping https://pairdrop.net/ here. Works on the same network or via the internet. There is an app, but it would also work in the browser on literally any device.

We shall hope so.

A few tests failing in beta, when this can be fixed before the release, is hardly newsworthy.

However it leaves a bad taste to even consider replacing coreutils when it’s nur clear that the replacement is rock solid. Those commands are used in millions of shell scripts distributed alongside applications. Should coreutils break, we’d learn the hard way.