I’ll probably use Codeberg or another Forgejo server for my next programming project, if/when I have one that is far enough along to publish (motivating myself to get that far is a tall task). Until then, everything I’d consider contributing to is either on GitHub, or is self-hosting some other software, so I don’t have a reason to create an account yet.

I have the same problem at my school, but thankfully, the school library has laptops I can borrow with the lockdown browser installed. It isn’t ideal, but is there a similar arrangement you could make?

Unlikely. While in theory someone could create a compatibility layer, it would be quite a challenge, as obviously, kernel modules are very closely tied to the specific kernel. I did some web searches, and only found the same few dead projects (that didn’t completely solve this issue anyway) that you found, and other forum posts that offer little encouragement.

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows 10 or 11, and the latest drivers for your network hardware. If you do, then there’s probably not much you can do about this.

Personally, I’ve had no problems whatsoever running the Office 365 apps needed by my school on Debian’s version of Firefox ESR. Aside from Outlook and Teams, I’m not asked to use them very often, as most assignments are turned in as PDFs, but when I have been required to use Word and Excel, I have had no problems.

Apparently GNOME 46 introduced support for Microsoft 365 accounts including OneDrive support in the file manager, so a distro that runs a recent GNOME version, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, may be your best option. But without that, you can still use a third-party project like onedriver or abraunegg’s OneDrive client.

The website claims that sponsors have no direct influence on the project (“board seats are not for sale”). The reality is that no project of sufficient scale to fully implement web standards can survive without a significant amount of funding.

It’s not systemd’s fault, though systemd most often implements offline updates. The arguments for and against offline updates have nothing to do with systemd.

A lot of Linux distros, and graphical package managers like Discover and GNOME Software, are moving in that direction, under the argument that updating while online can cause disruptions to running software, in the worst case including the package manager itself (which can brick the system if it occurs in the middle of a critical update), and updates can’t be applied until the affected program (or the system, in case of critical components like the kernel) restarts anyway. Fedora Magazine explains the reasoning here: https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

In my personal experience though, I have never had an issue enabling automatic online updates on Debian Stable, and have had computers stay online for several months without any noticeable issues beyond Firefox restarting, so the risk is there but it’s pretty minor.

Depends on your desktop environment. Look for an “autostart” or “startup applications” setting. If you’re on KDE, this could also be caused by “Restore previous session” under Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session.

I personally don’t use Arch, but I think the reason so many people find it stable in practice is because they know their system well. When something breaks or needs to be changed, they know which configuration file to edit, which package to {un,re,}install, what to look for in the AUR, etc., and they can usually avoid those things in the first place, because they went through a fairly hands-on install process, not to mention having the best Linux wiki in existence at their disposal.

On top of that, I think a lot of derivatives of Debian, including Ubuntu and all its derivatives, severely undermine their stability by providing custom configurations for or changes to software that are rarely documented and completely transparent to the user… until they break and leave no indication of how to fix them. Which is one reason why I ended up using base Debian.

For me, the outdated packages in stable have actually gotten better over time, as DEs get closer to a place where I don’t need any major updates to enjoy using them, Flatpaks become more readily available, and on a subjective level, I get less and less invested in current Linux news. Before Debian became my “forever distro”, I’d hopped to it a few times, and often found myself wishing for a newer piece of software that wasn’t in backports or flathub, or simply being bored with how stable it is, but that’s been happening less and less. And I feel like Debian 12 in particular left me with software that I wouldn’t mind being stuck with for two years.

I’ve gotten warnings to upgrade my browser with Debian’s Firefox ESR, but they never affected a website’s usability in a way that a newer version would fix, and they do provide security updates and new ESR series when they come out; even if you must have the newest Firefox, you can use the Flatpak.

Additionally, I’m currently on testing in order to get better support for my GPU, and each time I’ve tried to use it, it’s worked for me for a longer time than the last as I get better at resolving or avoiding broken packages. If you do experience issues like the one you described, and can replicate them, and no one else has already reported them, you should report them to Debian’s bug tracker. The whole point of Testing is to find and squash all the critical bugs before the next stable releases.

I always keep close track of these contests, it’s fun to take a look at all the different concepts. Though IIRC only Juliette Taka (who designed the themes for 8, 9, and 11) even submitted a theme last time. She’s great, and Emerald is great, but I hope this post gets someone even better involved with the artwork.

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.

I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I’m assuming it’s normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the “Automatic” pick works.

If it doesn’t work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.

I’m working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn’t happening anymore. I haven’t been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

There isn’t an alsa command on my system either, so that’s no surprise. But we’ll need more information to track down the cause, such as:

• What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
• What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
• Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
• What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just “dummy output”? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
• If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.

Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I’ve had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

1. I believe there is still an issue with Windows deleting Linux bootloaders during some updates. You’ll be fine if you install Linux on a separate disk, and even if you dual-boot on one disk and the bootloader gets deleted, there are ways to recover it. You don’t strictly need to have separate data and OS partitions, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether I prefer it - it makes distro hopping and disk encryption easier, at the cost of potentially inefficient use of space and serious consequences if your OS partition fills up.
2. Disk encryption is very straightforward if you use separate OS and data partitions. You literally just tick a box during the install and enter an extra password. It won’t upset Windows any more than a normal install does (i.e. Windows might think it’s corrupted, but won’t do anything without your input). With one partition for everything, it’s still possible, but the encryption will be much weaker and handled by the bootloader in a somewhat clunkier way, and I’m not sure if Mint even supports that setup.
3. I don’t have much experience with this myself, and certainly not on Linux Mint, so I’ll leave this one to other commenters.
4. Synaptic is just a fancy frontend to APT, and I think Mint also has something called mintInstall, which was just an apt frontend back when I used it, but I think it also supports Flatpak now. It’s entirely up to personal preference as to which UI you prefer. I do recommend you set up Flathub if it’s not there by default, as it gives you access to a ton of useful apps that can’t be packaged by Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint for various reasons.
5. Don’t download software from random websites unless it’s absolutely necessary. Chances are, their version either won’t work well, if at all, or will break your system. Try APT first, Flatpak second, everything else is a last resort option. If a program you used on Windows doesn’t have a (working, native) Linux version, try finding and learning to use an alternative that is in the APT repositories before downloading the Windows version and using it on Wine. Back up your most important files from Windows before installing Linux in dual boot, just in case you make a mistake somewhere. To answer the last question, stick to the default terminal emulator and Firefox installation unless there’s a feature you really want in another one; the distro’s developers picked them for a reason, after all.

I haven’t had much experience with Kubuntu, but I do know it has more preinstalled apps, slightly older versions of those apps (where KDE Neon has the latest version of every KDE app the day it releases), but slightly newer non-KDE apps in the non-LTS releases, and is more beholden to Canonical’s decisions, such as advertising Ubuntu Pro during upgrades or forcibly installing some programs as snaps. Kubuntu might hold your hand a bit more under certain circumstances, while KDE Neon keeps things simpler, but the difference in ease of use is not that significant, especially if you have any experience with Linux in the last ten years or so.

Any software that is in the Xubuntu repositories will also be available in other Ubuntu derivatives, and most likely Debian and all its derivatives as well. Only the official spins are likely to advertise Ubuntu Pro.

Mint XFCE is a good replacement, but I’m also partial to KDE Neon, which keeps preinstalled software to a minimum and is by far the most performant KDE distro I have tried. I myself use regular Debian, with KDE, though you can choose XFCE during the install.

VLC’s file format support is amazing for a project that rolls its own codecs, etc, but it’s missing some important features for me on the music front, primarily gapless playback and library management. I generally prefer to use software tailored to my DE. I’ve yet to find a better video player anywhere though; GNOME Videos and Kaffeine come closest and are a little easier to use, but are still far away from VLC’s capabilities.

Not sure why, but a lot of other distros did something just like this in the past (see the comments about WUBI) and no longer do. Q4OS still has a .exe installer though.