This is not open source? There is no license just a statement saying free to use for personal and commercial projects, but don’t redistribute or resell.

This freeware at best but if you contribute to this project it’s not clear who owns the work.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.

I use Proton mail. I like the suite of products (mail, calendar and storage), and it’s been reliable. They also seem to be secure.

You can use your own domain with them which is pretty standard but a good idea if you want long term email independence/remoce vendor lockin.

I also like that Proton mail are going down a non-profit route and have open sourced their apps. I’m not suggesting they’re perfect, but these moves and the scale of their set up makes me feel happier to use them.

K9 isn’t an email provider? It’s an email app. A good one but still.

Flatpak is supposed to be a sandbox, so if there is a vulnerable dependency then in theory any attack would be limited to the sandbox.

However, it depends on the software - some Flatpak need quite low level access to use, and in that case an attack or mlaware could get into the main system. And unfortunately Flatpak itself has vulnerabilities which cna negate the whole idea of a sandbox.

Flatpaks should be using up to date secure dependencies, but the reality is many do not. I would not rely on Flatpak for security. Even fully up to date Flatpaks can be insecure, and Flatpak itself have vulnerabilities that have needed fixing. And for many Flatpaks it’s not even clear who is maintaining them.

Flatpaks are useful for deploying software that’s just not available in your distros repos. But when deploying any software outside your repos - including App Image, build from source or 3rd party repos - you are opening your system up to security vulnerabilities. That’s the nature of installing 3rd party software. Flatpak offers some reassurance compared to some methods but it’s far from perfect.

If security is your prime concern, then Virtual Machines may be more secure route to sandboxing software (if done properly). Building from source would be the other option, as it means you take ont he responsibility for security by using the latest code including for dependencies. But there is no perfect option, it’s always about balancing risk vs convenience.

It’s also worth noting that software repos are also not perfect. But good distros invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them as up to date and secure as possible, usually via the hard work of volunteers.

Then you have to trust the person you are communicating with has turned off windows recall. That has to be the starting position.

Tools will come to block or break windows recall but it will still be based on trust that the recipient is using them. Privacy centred apps like Signal wouldn’t want windows screen shotitng every message for example. There are many apps and tools including in the professional sphere that would not want their data leaking via recall so it will come.

Unfortunately it may come late in the professional realm probably after scandals break. Employers using recall data to investigate staff for example - it’s bound to happen eventually.

My own organisation, a huge health organisation, has opted in to CoPilot. It’s crazy in my view, even if our data is ring fenced in some way. I don’t want private patient information being used to train Microsoft shitty tools, or stored on their servers. Regulation and the law is way behind when it comes to this stuff.

I’ve had lots of problems with Nvidia over the years; you’re lucky not to. Latest has been with Wayland which are ongoing. That being said Nvidia drivers are much better generally than they used to be, and I’ve not had the myriad of small issues I used to get.

This is less to do with them being closed source drivers so much as their drivers being poorly maintained in the past. They seem much better maintained but even now the software support lags behind windows - you have to use 3rd party open source software to make use of the streaming features for example.

I believe for mouse config in all DEs there are issues with the libinput library and X11 which can somewhat limit config options. If you’re using Wayland then you should find an advanced tab in the mouse options in KDE settings app which may do what you want.

Otherwise imwheel is widely recommended command line tool. There is a comprehensive guide linked below, and the tool can be autostarted in the background once setup.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mouse-scroll-speed

Is there a reason you gave /var it’s own partition? Or is the problem that your entire root file system is full?

As others have said if you have a /var partition, resizing should fix the problem but the other solution would be to migrate the contents back to your main file system partition. Presumably at present there is a symbolic link folder pointing to your /var partition? Copy the /var partition contents into a new folder then boot in to recovery mode and delete the symbolic link and rename the new folder to /var. However presumably you have a good reason for splitting /var out.

If you don’t have a separate partition then the issue may be your root system itself is full and that partition needs resizing if possible or cleaning our to make space.

Finally, Flatpak does also use the /var directories in the home users folders (it uses this for single user installs of software vs system wide installs). It’s possible it’s axtually the home folder/partition that is full and that needs resizing or cleaning out to make space .

Ubuntu does work and is a decent distro in many ways. The problems are around how canonical leverages things for its own financial benefit for the detriment of users and the Linux community.

A good example is Snap. It is forced on users - even Firefox is a snap on Ubuntu. This is not an efficient way fo end users to run their system or their most used software.

Instead of making the builds available as standard software, users have to use the Snap or go hunting elsewhere for builds. That’s anti-user and is identical to how Microsoft behaves with windows. It doesn’t do things to benefit users, it does things to benefit Microsoft.

It’s arguable whether what snap does is actually worth the overhead - I can see that it is more secure in many ways. But then so it Flatpak, and that is more universally used for desktop software across Linux distros. Snap has some inherent benefits for server side use but then why force it on end users where it is not as good as Flatpak in many ways? Or Appimage?

So Ubuntu is fine in many ways, but why bother when you can go for alternatives and give the best of both worlds? Mint is an Ubuntu based distro without snap and other canonical elements. I used mint for ages, it’s great and there is a reason it’s so popular.

I’ve moved on to OpenSuSE now but the Ubuntu ecosystem is fine, it works well for many, and it’s very well documented and supported which often works downstream in Mint and others. It’s just Ubuntu itself thats a bit crappy due to the decisions made to suite canonical rather than what users want or would suit them best. In the end it all comes down to personal choice and what people are willing to accept from their distro.

Just on the KDE front, I’m assuming you’ve optimised your KDE set up for your PC?

If not, first open your Settings app and in the search box type “Effects” - disable all the fancy desktop effects.

Next, if you’re on X11, go into the “Display and Monitor” section and disable compositing (you can also temporairly disable this with Alt+Shift+F12 to see what impact it has). This option is not available in Wayland; but you may be better using X11 if you don’t have a dedicated GPU? I’m not sure I’d be messing with Wayland on an old laptop; I’ve had serious issues on a high end PC - definitely improved with 6.1, but I’m using X11 still.

But KDE 6 isn’t as svelt as KDE 5 was, so even optimised it may just not be up to the job.

XFCE is a good shout, and should run nicely on a 2013 laptop.

OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I’d used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.

No I thinks is basically right although could be better worded maybe

/sys is virtual file structure for kernel system info

/proc is virtual file structure of kernel process info

My understanding is /proc came first but was abused/free for all and started being used for all sorts of non standard/process kernel access. So /sys was created with stricter rules to make it more standardised.

Yea it is user friendly. If you’re using your computer once a week presumably its for things like web browsing or working with documents - these are very easy and straight forward to do in linux.

The other big benefit is the cost - linux is free and you’ll save £120 on a basic version of Windows which can be used to get get a better PC or just saved.

Add to that no advertising, much more private and entirely yours to do what you like with. And if you don’t like it you can easily install Windows instead, so its zero risk to try Linux.

Fossify Phone is better. Simple Mobile Tools was sold to ZipoApps which has a history of bloating apps with advertising, telemetry, and charges etc. Fortunately Simple tools were open source and Fossify is the free and open source fork of all the apps in the suite, some even maintained by original makers from Simple Mobile Tools.

Maybe worth trying an alternative OS with a different kernel entirely from Linux, as a live USB. For example Haiku or ArcaOS?

However if you’ve tried Windows and not had the issue then it may not add anything as you nay already have excluded defective hardware?

It still helps damage reddit’s commercialisation of users because historic posts have gaps or disappear for new users. Editing posts and replacing with gobbledygook is probably more effective.

Also, its not clear reddit is able to retain deleted posts. They have a vast live site to maintain - why would they ever have been focused on having an immutable back up of all deleted posts? They may have snapshots to restore after short term issues but it does not follow that they keep snapshots going back in time. Perhaps they do or perhaps like many companies they do the bare minimum in favour of keep costs down?

I personally think its worth using sites that edit your posts and replace with garbage, as that is harder to separate out from true edits and helps pollute the data set for AI companies.