Sometimes yt-dlp drops fragments leading to corrupt files, maybe that’s what’s going on.

I went through something similar with my Brother printer, but stuck with USB. I’ll have to give your tips a try later.

I haven’t been able to get 2-sided to work except with LibreOffice for some reason, but maybe that DuplexNoTumble thing is the key…or value.

Also, for Plank at least, I have a feeling that development has stopped so waiting won’t help. You’ll need to find an alternative.

Hi,

It it possible that Plank doesn’t work with Wayland, plain and simple.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/plank/+bug/1632841

The latest version dates back to 2019.

I think Dash to dock is used often.

For Guake the version in Bookworm is from 2022 and you may need to set an environmental variable or perhaps it isn’t built with Wayland support on Debian.

You could hit up the Debian forums for a better answer.

If I’m correct, that would mean that technically, I could authenticate to an SSH server without supplying my name if I use a private key?

Yes.

The public key contains a user name/email address string, I’m aware, is the same information also encoded into the private key as well? If yes, I don’t see the need to hand that info to an SSH call. If no, how does the SSH server know which public key it’s supposed to use to challenge my private key ownership?

Most of this can be found reading through different Git docs, whether from GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, Gitea, etc. When using Git you can use different keys for different repos/forges and each has a defined pair, similar to accessing different SSH servers that require specific key pairs. I do understand your questions, but I lack the finesse to explain it since I really only use SSH and Git for my blog and not for anything too complicated.

There are some tips here that might help

https://github.com/dajeed/arch-linux-font-improvement-guide

Important to note that restarting or running sudo fc-cache -fv is key when doing things with fonts.

I don’t feel like my system is bloated.

It probably isn’t bloated.

I guess it’s subjective, but when do you consider a system to be bloated?

If someone is testing out several different DEs or WMs and installing meta-packages, then I suppose I might say that things are bloated because they could end up having multiple apps to control the same preferences along with different libraries, etc., and then when they decide to update it takes ages. That would be bloated for me. I have tried the minimal stuff before. Like you said, hundreds of packages, not thousands. But, I didn’t install any manpages. So when I decided I wanted those manpages the number of packages ballooned. Nothing was really bloated, just a number on neofetch going up.

Content mills…

Just go to the source. The dev is sharing more info and videos. Sure, it is on LinkedIn which is rubbish but at least it isn’t 9to5Linux

https://youtube.com/watch?v=h96VqpbUAk8

Strawberry Music Player has smart and dynamic playlist generators. I cannot say how well they work.

The package manager for Alpine is…so fast. The community (IRC/Gitlab) is responsive and helpful.

An animated series is also in the works, so there is also that to look forward to.

My current personal laptop is a ThinkPad 13 2nd Gen. I believe it was released in 2017. It was my work laptop for 4 years and was gifted to me by the employer. During those 4 years as a work laptop it proved its worth—9 hours of teaching per day plugged into a projector. Once it was mine I slapped Linux on it. Today, the battery still lasts 10 hours.

So, definitely look into getting something used. You probably don’t need the best of the best. If I had to choose right now I would rank my needs and try to get something close enough.

An i3 or equivalent might be fine, and i7 might be overkill. Something with an i5, perhaps? Lots of people say 8GB is the minimum for RAM, my computer has 6GB and works. But, if I were going to buy today I might take 16GB just as future-proofing. I would also need that USB-C.

Browse around sites like https://linux-hardware.org/ before purchasing to make sure you don’t get any surprises.

Speaking of surprises, I would take anything with Nvidia just in case, and whatever model I take would need to be reparable or upgradable.

If you decide on buying new, you might as well take a look at the vendors mentioned by other users. System76, Slimbook, Framework, StarBook, and so on will hurt your wallet a bit, but at least you know the hardware won’t result in time lost troubleshooting.

Oh it certainly can! I haven’t done it like this in a long time. My hopping days are all but over and the main things I need to backup are music, photos, and books. As long as I have them on some external drive I just wipe it all and start over. Still, though, the option is there.

Partitions.

Many distros will partition your disk as /, /home, and swap.

If you want to, when installing a different distro, you can manually format and install the system to / and not format /home but flag it to be mounted as home.

The distro I came here to mention has been hated on already. My dislike goes to the distros that start off fine, and somehow screw it up.

Honestly, I remember using Manjaro ages ago. It had an official Openbox spin (not a community thing). I had already used Arch but I didn’t even check to see what it was based on when I tried. I thought, “green is nice” and it was. It very quickly became less nice. I didn’t use it after that, but I’ve heard plenty of hate since then.

I’m going to put another one out there just for fun.

Distrowatch’s n°1… MX Linux

Nothing wrong with it, but the fact that it is number 1 (I know their ranking is just for fun and based on page hits) and doesn’t deserve it is the issue. It works great, when I used it I didn’t like how there was a second application for installating certain software. I think I used the Xfce setup. Again, it’s fine, but if a first-time Linux desktop user sat down and installed that, it might not be the best initiation.

Popular and highly ranked distros give Desktop Linux a bad name sometimes is what I’m saying.

It’s easy. After running setup-alpine and rebooting with a bar install there is built-in script setup-desktop that lets you install Gnome, Plasma or Xfce.

You can find install scripts like Alpine Suck around the web https://git.sr.ht/~bt/alpine-suck

Or check out the wiki for other inspiration https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Category:Desktop

If you use Edge, I would recommend subscribing to the user mailing list though, just in case.

Don’t know if it is a must-try, but LXQt has come a long way. The file browser is excellent. Everything is fast and snappy and very traditional (start button, system tray, etc.). Runner up I guess.

You can run Alpine as a desktop. The Edge branch. New software, got what you need, installs and updates fast.

This sounds like a privacy concern. Maybe one of the privacy communities will have a better answer.

You’re worried that the bios will ping hp and hand over info, is this something that you have info on?

No. You’re right. I should have added a bold warning that it will reset gnome back to defaults too.