palordrolap

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

Linux Musk sounds like the evil counterpart to Mint. A fork of Red Star OS, etc.

Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.

You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

They’ve sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn’t provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

Logitech still haven’t written their own Linux driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don’t.

Pretty sure Cinnamon panels are designed to fit to the width (or height if they’re attached to the side) of the screen and can’t be altered. (The depth/breadth/“thickness” of the panel can be changed, but that’s not particularly relevant here.)

The same may also be true of panel-like features in XFCE and MATE too, but I can’t easily confirm.

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I’ve been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer’s been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I’ve thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I’ve had an Xorg update. That’s more of a “your graphics card is so old Mint doesn’t really support it any more” problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren’t quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it’s not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn’t get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn’t know what you were doing.

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell’s manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won’t cause an infinite loop.

* And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user’s ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn’t have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I’ve tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn’t intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn’t need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

One of Perl’s design principles was the Robustness principle, though it probably wasn’t known by that name at the time. (The name came about around the same time Perl was becoming a thing, something something zeitgeist something.)

Perl can be locked down and made to complain (with at least a couple of levels of pedantry) when things are wrong, but unlike most other languages, it doesn’t do so by default.

find’s expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.

That said, there’s nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.

The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I’m guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)

I think I might be the third option: f’ss-tab.

Couldn’t tell you where that’s from. When I first ran Linux, the year didn’t start with a 2.

They need to update that. They jumped to version 24 for 2024. 24.2.3 is the current version.

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn’t laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

To some extent I think they’re thinking of people who are in the Windows/Mac situation of wanting a stable OS that doesn’t require getting hands dirty (so to speak) every 5 minutes to do basic things, and who generally call in a relative or friend who knows what they’re doing (and is almost certainly the person who installed Mint in the first place) when things really need changing.

There’s never more than two LMDEs active at any one time, so while they are giving themselves a little extra work, they’re also managing the main Ubuntu-based Mint derivatives at the same time so they’re bound to have some kind of streamlining at their side.

As for 5-to-6 upgrades, they’ve provided an official tool that will work for most people and will require very little admin user interaction once it’s off and running. A sensible sysadmin would like to have a backup anyway, just in case.

My initial comment was aimed at the odd rare case like myself who isn’t always up for sysadmin work (it’s why I’m on Mint after all), or doesn’t have the time. There’s no immediate rush to use that official tool. Take your time. Make your backups, etc.

If you want bleeding-edge rolling updates, Mint is not the distro for you (though LMDE is a little closer to that than regular Mint).

Do they keep up with security updates and patches, though? Yes. Very much so.

Copypasting: (source)

The cautious approach for LMDE5 users: If your system is working fine and there are no especially must-have features in LMDE6, there is almost certainly no rush to upgrade. Take your time.

Make backups. Test backups. Play games. Work. Do things entirely unrelated to the distro.

You could even almost (aaalmost) completely forget about LMDE6 (but do keep an eye on the LM blog).

The Mint team haven’t announced an EOL date for LMDE5 yet, but if past dates are anything to go by, it’ll be at least 18 months before they pull the plug. Even then, LTS updates might still filter through from Debian proper.

[How many people will actually see this message and how many it actually applies to out of them might well include me and literally one other guy somewhere else on the planet, but if you’re that one guy, breathe friend. No rush.]