SavvyWolf

For the swap space, yes that’s for when you run out of RAM. 48GiB is plenty of RAM, so you should be fine without it. I have 32GiB of RAM on my system and have been running without swap for ages without issue.

Hardening guides like that are mostly designed for things like web servers which are connected to the public internet and need higher scrutiny. The default configuration for distros like Mint should be secure enough for the average user.

However, don’t feel invincible and run random code from random sites. Both Windows and Linux can’t protect you against malicious code you run yourself.

Having organised partitions is the kind of thing that people obsessed with organisation do. For most people, the default partitioning scheme is fine. However, as always, remember to keep backups of important data.

For installing software, Mint has a Software Centre (which is distinct from the Snap Store). I’d recommend installing software using that for the average user.

In Mint, there are three main types of packages:

• Debian/APT packages, which are provided by Mint (well, technically by the Debian distro and they trickle down to Mint, but technicalities). Not all software is available from Mint’s repos and they may be out of date.
• Flatpak packages, which are provided either by developers themselves or dedicated fans. They are usually more up to date and have a degree of sandboxing.
• Snap packages, which are controlled by a company named Canonical. As of late, Canonical has been a bit “ehhhh”, so there’s pushback against Snap. Mint has it disabled and has their reasoning explained here: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html

Mint’s software centre is able to install both Debian and Flatpak packages. I’d recommend using it where possible since it allows automatic upgrades and easier installation/uninstallation.

It’s open source. If 32 bit support is important enough, people can fork and maintain it.

Don’t know if this is true for all environments, but you might be able to just create a file in ~/Templates for it to show up in that list.

Dual booting is fine. Bitlocker just makes it so that the installer isn’t able to resize the Windows partition (since it’s encrypted), but you can resize it in Windows to create enough space to put Mint on. You can also disable bitlocker entirely, but your files will no longer be encrypted.

There’s worry about the bootloader being nuked, but I think that’s a bit of an overreaction. Now everything is EFI, Windows shouldn’t touch other OSes. If it does, then that doesn’t require a full reinstall; it’s possible to boot from the live USB (the installer) and reinstall just the bootloader.

I don’t know if they still do it, but Mint used to do staggered updates (through their update manager) for some packages. They would start out making the update only available for, say, 10% of people and then slowly built up to 100% if no issues were discovered.

One thing that many guides tend to skip is how to install software. People coming from Windows might try to install software the “Windows way” by going to the website and downloading them. That is just likely to cause pain and suffering for a number of reasons.

Instead, every beginner friendly distro has its own flavour of software centre that users should be encouraged to use instead. Maybe even include a link to flathub in the guide or something.

Ubuntu 25.10 entered beta on September 18th. It releases on October 9th. It’s still in beta.

… Yeah? Beta software having bugs isn’t the hottest of takes.

I’m willing to bet that if the GNU coreutils getting bumped a minor version caused widespread issues for a day, nobody would even bother reporting in it…

Rust and C are the same “tier” of performance, but GNU coreutils has the benefit of several decades of development and optimization that the Rust one needs to catch up with.

This would never happen if it were licensed under GPL. /s

Is the only reason they don’t have AI because they just don’t have the resources to set up and run their own models and bots?

Skipped to the “ugly” part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?

I think a bigger problem is that it’s hard to find “best practices” because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.

Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it’s a struggle when it comes to doing things like “how do I change the source of a package”, “how do I compose two modules together” and “how do I add a repo to a flake so it’s visible in my config”. Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they’re taking about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Alt+SysRq+C, although your distro may have it disabled by default.

A fair warning though, safety is relative and crashing the kernel can be destructive. Make sure you have backups when breaking things.

Ubuntu back in the Gnome 2 days.

For my main desktop I use Mint because it just works, widely supported and Cinnamon is good (sadly no Wayland yet. ;_;). I also use Home-manager for my configuration because it allows me to easily just specify my config as a set of files I can check into git.

For my server, I use NixOS, because having all my configuration in a few text files is very nice to get an overview of what my server is doing.

It’s the directory that needs to be writable to delete files, not the file itself.

Although the immutable bit (if that’s what you’re talking about - I thought you meant unsetting the write bit) might change that, I’m not sure.

The home directory would need to be immutable, not bashrc.

I don’t think that actually works; the attacker could just remove .bashrc and create a new file with the same name.

In an ideal world, a search engine will point to this thread, where the answer is the topvoted comment.

With the death of Stackoverflow and Reddit, hopefully Lemmy can fill the void of an information archive. :P