BananaTrifleViolin

Out of interest, why do you use thorn to represent “th”?

EDIT: Nm, read your profile; I did wonder if it was to fuck with AI. Fighting the good fight.

Depends on the Pi in terms of how much you can do, but yes.

I have a Pi 5, and I’m running Pi Hole, Nginx porxy manager, Jellyfin, Syncthing, Paperless NGX, and a full servarr stack (including Qbittorrent and a VPN). No issues; 4.6 gb out of 7.9gb ram in use, and no appreciable bottlenecks.

I would just caution that things like Jellyfin are a moveable feast - I am 1 user streaming content on my own to 1 device without issues at 4k. But more simultaneous users and if you start depending on transcoding your mileage may vary. So yes Jellyfin and other services will run fine, but any server can be put under pressure if it’s not adequate for the actual usage.

Sounds like good news; more sponsorship for KDE and an LTS release which will benefit all users.

Well just FYI, you could enable the Kubuntu backports to move to the latest version of KDE and it’s software?

EDIT: Nm, looks like the version in the backports is from 2025

I’m confused - just tested this on my Dolphin and I can right click anywhere (including blank areas and other columns) in the row in Detailed mode, and with or without expandable folders on. I don’t need to select it first with LMB. Also if I right click, close the menu and scroll with scroll wheel I can even select multiple items.

I’m using version 26.04.3, and KDE Plasma 6.7.3.

Well the other side of that is managing software with hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development over it’s lifetime is also hard. There is a sunken cost fallacy with X11, and X11 was constantly extended to be what people needed it to be rather than the best design for the problems arising.

Having said that, I’m not sure Wayland is the ideal solution. X11 doesn’t get in the way of solutions to problems, while Wayland really does. We needed a new and modern display server, but the Wayland project has decided to make that quite restricted - I personally think the security model is too far in the other direction from X11.

Librewolf, Waterfox and GNU IceCat are all Firefox forks.

For what you’re asking for, GNU IceCat is probably the best fit - the project syncs up with Firefox ESR but removes all proprietary stuff and maintains it’s own extensions. It has some privacy improvements too but is otherwise set up as a standard browser. It’s basically Ungoogled Chromium for Firefox. The downside is the project doesn’t release project binaries; you have to look for binaries in your distro (and many don’t provide them) or use GNU Guix - the package manager from the GNU project (which can be installed on any system; it’s a bit like NIX). Or build them yourself from Github. Details are here: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Librewolf and Waterfox are both excellent but by default are very privacy focused and locked down, so you may need to make config changes to get them back to a more “standard” default browser set up (sacrificing the privacy benefits in the process).

Personally I use Firefox; I understand what you’re saying but the steps you talk about are at first install and that’s not something I do often so can tolerate it.

EDIT: Just checked, IceCat isn’t in OpenSuSE’s default repos (disappointingly) but I did find it in Fedora’s repos (both standard and it’s Flatpak store). So it’s a bit hit and miss. Guix is universal but it’s a bit of a bloaty way to do it if you only want one item from it’s repos. Fedora Flatpaks can of course be installed on pretty much any X86/AMD64 system by adding registry.fedoraproject.org as a flatpak remote (alongside Flathub).

Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn’t normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you’ve set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).

Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be “seen” in windows. Just to be clear, you’ve not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.

And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?

So I’m not condoning or condeming.

I would say you can dual boot linux - that is have TWO entirely separate Linux installs on your PC. Have one be your main Linux desktop, and have a separate partition which you boot into to use for riskier stuff. Just ensure it has no access at all to your other drive and be careful mouting peripherals like USB drives. That way you can get full native experience with your PC, without having to sacrifice performance for a VM set up. I would also set up a VPN to run at all times within that 2nd Linux install, with kill switch for the network if it disconnects.

I’d say distro choice for newbies should probably come down to the following questions:

• What are you using Linux for / what device will it go on? A desktop distro is very different from distros for servers, or single board devices like Raspberry Pi. Also even for a desktop, a modern PC versus an older device changes things up too.

• Which desktop do you like the look of the most? If you like the look of KDE, go for something KDE based like OpenSuSE or Kubuntu or Fedora KDE spin. If it’s Gnome then Fedora, or Ubuntu or OpenSuSE Gnome. If you want something windows like and straight forward, then Linux for Cinnamon. If you want something newer then Pop_Os! for Cosmic

• What kind of release schedule? Do you want something stable and robust; big well tested upgrades every few years but otherwise just something very reliable - then go for Debian. Want something cutting edge with all the latest packages then go for a rolling release distro like OpenSuSe or Fedora or Arch based distros.

• How popular do you want it to be for support? If you want to have lots of simple advice and tutorials then maybe go for something thats been widely popular like Mint or popular and around for a long time like Debian. If you want a technical challenge but with good documentation then go for Arch. Otherwise most mainstream distros will have support or you can learn to turn generic advice to your chosen distro.

• Does the distro’s ethos or location matter to you? If not then go by other factors. Location generally doesn’t matter too much, but if it does to you (e.g. such as the legal system the orgs are under governance with), then maybe for European distros like Mint, or OpenSuSe. If you don’t mind American based then maybe Fedora. etc. Similarly ethos - free software only vs proprietary software.