A small ultrasonic cleaner does wonders for getting glasses clean. Just use a couple drops of dish soap in the water and they’ll come out like new.

No, it’s a side effect of how everything’s handled by rpm-ostree currently, and it’s on the list of issues to be fixed.

See Here for more info

/etc is writable, so no reboots are required. That said, /etc is treated in a special way and each deployment will have its own /etc, based on the previous one.

So if you make changes to /etc then revert to a previous deployment, your changes will be reverted as well. But if you make changes and upgrade (or do whatever to create a new deployment), your changes will bu preserved.

Looks like you’re on Fedora Silverblue (or other Atomic version). This is happening because the system groups are in /usr/lib/group rather than /etc/group and this causes the issue you’re seeing here. You can work around it by getting into a root shell with something like

sudo -i

and then getting the group added to /etc/group with

grep -E '^dialout' /usr/lib/group >> /etc/group

after that, you’ll be able to add your user to the group with

usermod -aG dialout pipe

As far as I’m aware, the Truecrypt backdoor thing was speculation regarding the termination of the Truecrypt project, but it was not confirmed. You can see here that development of Truecrypt ceased in 2014. Veracrypt was forked around that time. As for whether or not you can trust it, you’ll want to evaluate the audits that have been performed and decide if you trust them. You can find a link to what seems like the latest audit here.

Truecrypt is abandoned, and has vulnerabilities that will not be fixed. Veracrypt is a fork of Truecrypt that is still actively maintained.

Glass cliff?

I’ve been using linux almost exclusively since somewhere around 2008 or so. The main thing is to ensure that you are still able to do what you want to do with your computer, regardless of the OS. You may have to seek out some alternatives to programs that you’re currently using, but there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something available. Check out the available software on the Mint install you currently have, and check out protondb to see if the games you’re interested in are compatible. I’d recommend creating a backup of your current system before you do anything just in case you need to revert back.

On a distro like Mint, I’ve never (or at least very rarely) run into any issues outside of NVIDIA drivers, and even that isn’t too bad given that it’s a slower-moving distro and Cinnamon isn’t using Wayland anyway. I put Mint on my parents’ computer since it ended up being easier for them than Windows was. That doesn’t mean that you won’t have any issues, but Mint is pretty easy to use, and they have a reasonably active forum for asking for help.

For what it’s worth, Windows 11 is pretty lousy. You get ads shoved everywhere they can shove them, and their telemetry is pretty invasive, imo. That’s not even mentioning their future plans where everyone gets pushed to their cloud services. If you have any questions, please ask and I’ll answer as best I can.