1. yes you do. A good distro I recommend newbies is Linux Mint, because it’s visually similar to windows. Another great option for beginners is Pop!OS, because the developers take more care to automate things that you might encounter when first starting to use Linux. Overall, it doesn’t really matter that much what distribution you choose in terms of what software is available, it all comes down to design choices that change how hard things are to do (but reward you with more customization, of course)

2. you will not be able to play some games that have an anticheat that forbids linux. The main culprit is EasyAntiCheat (while it does support linux, enabling that support is a choice by the game’s developer). The main games I have noticed can’t work are Fortnite (EAC), Hunt: showdown (EAC), league of legends & Valorant (Vanguard), R6 Siege (EAC) and PUBG (EAC). You can use protondb to learn what games in your steam library are known to simply not work.

Don’t expect games that you own on the windows store to work at all (this includes Xbox game pass). Most of them are available on steam, but that requires buying them again.

Most of the other stuff works, generally. Valve’s Proton supports a very large part of most games today, and unless the game you want to launch is very old or specifically doesn’t want you to use Linux, chances are the game will work first try, especially indies. Protondb is a great help to see what parameters one needs to use to make it work if it doesn’t first try. Make sure to “enable proton compatibility for all games” in steam’s main options, otherwise it won’t let you download game.

For tools that aren’t on steam but target steam games (for example mod managers), you should use protontricks (it’s most likely in your distro’s package manager, you don’t need to download it from GitHub) to launch the tool’s exe inside of the proton context of that game (steam maintains a separate pseudo-windows install (a “wine prefix”) for each game that uses proton). From there, the tool will behave as if you launched it on windows.

For tools that stand alone, you can add them to steam as a non-steam game and in it’s properties, force it to use proton, which allows you to launch e.g. cracked games. I also recommend using Bottles to manage your third-party launchers.

3. most likely you’ll be fine. You’re unlikely to encounter any issues that haven’t been encountered by anyone before, so don’t hesitate to Google and to ask for help on various forums. You don’t need to know how to program to use Linux, though it does unlock some pretty nice things (it also does on windows for that matter)

4. windows 10 LTSC will continue being available for a few years. If you need a windows partition (imo you only do need it if you want to play games that have restrictive anticheat), I suggest installing it on a separate disk altogether, because windows tends to not play nice with other partitions on the same disk, and will create headaches you could have avoided.

5. welcome! I hope you’ll enjoy your time away from ads in the start menu.

Also, if someone claims asylum, international law explicitly forbids sending them back to their country (not that international law has any bearing whatsoever on this but y’know, add a layer on top)

How are we going to post this and forget about our boys

My latest project runs on a VM I use vscode’s ssh editing feature on. I edit the only copy of the file in existence (I have made no backup and there is no version control) and then I restart the systems service.

So what if I mess it up? Big deal. The discord bot goes down for a few minutes and I fix it.

Same goes for the machine configs. Ideally the machines are stable, the critical ones get backups, and if they aren’t stable then I suppose the best way to fix it would be in prod ( my VMs run debian, they’re stable).

XY problem: you’d spend more efforts and resources sourcing and installing this thing (that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist) rather than fix the existing sensor that’s already in the mouse. Fix the existing sensor that’s in the mouse.

Even if that worked, these cells will never be able to hold a significant charge.

I’ll have you know “nineteen” in french is “dix-neuf” or “ten-nine”

You can also use yt music revanced.

Yeah it does

My current daily driver is a 13€ blue switches thing for AliExpress with 20€ DSA keycaps also from AliExpress. Both are fine.

Pretty much all monitoring solutions on the market track cert expiration nowadays. I get an alert when any of my certs have <5 days left

JS execution in a browser is hardly a problem.

That virultotal report looks completely fine to me, including the behavior tab.

Regardless, imagine what would happen if the firefox pdf reader was vulnerable to a well-known attack (of course there probably exist 0 days but they wouldn’t be burned on you). Any attacker could simply link you a PDF and you’d be infected simply for clicking the link? If this was true, people would stop using firefox because it would be insecure.

Same as last week or no?

[…] and the absence of any credible economic benefit caused the plan to be quietly shelved.

Truly non-credible

FAMAS???

It’s… Not great. It’s on par with other $300 laptops, which isn’t saying much. 8Gb of RAM in current year isn’t really enough anymore, and the screen is basically the cheapest possible. You’re looking for a laptop with a screen resolution near 1920x1080, and ideally 16 Gb of RAM.

It’s gotten very hard to recommend laptops based on the brand name, since pretty much every brand has started pumping out crappy laptops to capitalize on the brand.

Like others said, try looking at business laptops, either surplus or liquidation sales. They’re not great either but at least you’re ideally not getting fleeced.

If you’re feeling adventurous (and I’m mincing my words, this won’t be a breeze if you don’t know much but you’ll learn a ton), the best bang for buck you can get in a portable format is a Steam Deck with USB hub + mouse and keyboard (could be travel size if you want). Can be had for less than $500, if you have the budget portable screens also exist, and for that price it beats any modern laptop under $1000. I understand that it’s not exactly for everyone though.

It’s in fortnite

It seems your assessment is correct. You’d be surprised at the speeds you can get on poor wifi when you don’t care about latency. The average speed marching up with your download is a dead giveaway too. The fact that maximum over 5 minutes exceeds it is a bit weird, but it could be explained by some networking equipment in the middle (probably at your ISP if I was to guess) terminating MTUs for whatever reason. A common one is misconfiguring various solutions for capping internet speeds to subscribers, where your local MTU will be set correctly but the outgoing ones will be set to the maximum speed of the link.

Probably on account of every window in every city being broken by shockwaves from bombardments