here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.

it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.

if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.

if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.

if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.

there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”

if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.

when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.

the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?

but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…

not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.

not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.

so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.

it’s using mpv under the hood, so I guess it should be able to play audio headless. I’m using allcast to cast to it and control it.

I’m using macast as a media renderer, for video and audio. don’t know if there’s a docker container for it.

to each his own, but I can’t stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject “horror” that’s systemd, his “helpful” notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.

so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it’s needed in the case of MX.

thank you, very thorough. are them messages public somewhere, on my or their profile or whathaveyou?

guess I’m fucking stupid, no understando how to do that. help please?

I used enpass for years and was a happy user. one day it prompted me for some re-authentication bullshit security theater. although in that instant it was an easy task, took me all of 10 seconds, it demonstrated a scary amount of power they had as I couldn’t bypass it and access my data. from that point on, its days were numbered.

the second issue is the export functionality that was seriously lacking and I had to resort to 3rd party converter tools to convert it to keepassXC; no way that flew by their QC, it had to be intentional.

kodi and its derivatives are not something you should be using. it’s shit software on so many levels and we should burn it in the deepest volcanos we got.

try one of these:

1. run lineageOS TV (konstakang images) on it and install regular ATV apps for the services mentioned. so, like googletv except there’s no spying and ads and shit.

2. create a normal linux box that has a DLNA sink e.g. using macast. there’s no remote control, you use your android/iOS device to send it stuff, like movie from Jellyfin or a youtube video, and it plays it back and allows some control (pause, play, rew/ff, etc)

3. dedicated Jellyfin box; same as 2) but boots right into jellyfin client. it can be run in TV mode where it reacts to only up/down/left/right/enter/back, via gamepad or remote controller. if yours isn’t recognised, you can emulate it with InputRemapper.

not familiar with how twitch does stuff.

you also have the option of installing a normal raspi distro and then using a wireless keyboard and mouse/touchpad to run it, but I am of the opinion that once the device gets placed by the TV, it loses all keyboard and mouse privileges and should only be operated via the TV’s remote.

eons ago I heard and internalised an awesome phrase: “don’t analyze the problem - solve it”.

in that vein, install it yourself and ship the laptop to him. don’t matter what it cost, it’s not like it’s gonna bankrupt you and it’s not like you’re gonna do this multiple times per year.

you’re 100% in control of everything and that’s the next best thing to being there and doing it for yourself. you’re gonna figure out how to remotely do half of the things you mention across CGNATs and whatnot? I am sure you got better things to do; I know dad has.

we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper’s vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.

I’ve been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn’t understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.

a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don’t really like it. it’s wasteful and disorganized and I don’t see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.

I thought it’s a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it’s gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there’s a ton of issues that way.

instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.

try the archive https://web.archive.org/web/20250613134705/https://thelibre.news/actually-what-is-a-freedesktop-portal/

whoever configured thelibre web server should be replaced, at the very least. loads as if it’s on the dark side of the moon.

edit: cool article though

using laptops as a forever-plugged-in device (regardless if workstation or server) isn’t the greatest idea. as an intermediary solution, like until you have something more permanent in place, sure. otherwise, look elsewhere.

limiting battery charge isn’t available on all laptop models and is aimed at preserving the battery’s functionality; it doesn’t solve the issue of a forever charged and never emptied battery. on the other hand, removing the battery on a lot of models limits their performance, significantly.

what is a viable solution is if you get a laptop board that runs at full power without battery, you can remove the board from the laptop, retrofit it with better cooling and additional storage (mini-PCI or M.2 to SATA adapters) and you end up with an energy-efficient server. but that requires a lot of work and is not something recommended for non-enthusiasts.

in short, sell it or swap it for something more adequate.

so, like torify up until now? tried it on a couple of apps as a replacement, works fine. the rust build chain though, madonn’…

I run all three of those (delta on hosted IMAP servers, matrix synapse, prosody for XMPP) for various clients and each has its own issues that need work. with deltachat there is no fallback if the project stops or gets taken over or whatever. with XMPP at least you have options, this client, that client, etc. as well as decades long development. based on that, some free advice (worth what you paid for it) - don’t give up on XMPP just yet. good luck.

it’s a super-shitty experience, both on XMPP and Matrix, and you touched only on one of the aspects. and that’s not even the bad part. the bad part is nothing better is on the horizon.

so what you gotta do is put on your big boy pants, sit down and figure this shit out. here’s where I made I misstep, let’s figure out how to do redundant backups and seamless restore accross devices. etc.

because, this is it. there is nothing better coming, you gotta learn how to make do with the tech we have. offloading your shit to benevolent dictators and hoping everything will be fine is not a strategy,

do you have a ballpark figure of potential savings in $/€ per annum? and for what hardware? I remember calculating something similar and I don’t think I broke $20 in total, so promptly forgot about it.

oh it’s the “au lot” guy

not a plex user but someone buried the lede here… to me, this is the neon sign that screams GTFO:

we noticed that you’ve accessed libraries in the past

what business of yours is it to notice my private comings and goings?! what other actionable intel do y’all keep in your logs?! bye!