That’s another option, but it’s a bit more cumbersome having to cherrypick which exact backports you need for your specific hardware. Also, if you then for some reason don’t upgrade to the next stable release when it comes out, backports get abandoned after 1 year instead of the customary 3 years for the rest of the oldstable release.

From my experience, running trixie/testing the past year or so on a minipc with hardware that was a bit too recent for bookworm, I can say that the cadence of security patches has been about the same between bookworm and testing.

And let’s be honest, on a desktop system your main attack surface is going to be the software you go online with, i.e. the browser. So if you make sure that is kept up to date (flatpak, vendor repo, …) that already goes a long way.

the ctrl-super-alt is completely different

It’s not “completely different” … and that’s the problem. Completely different I can handle. I can manage knowing vim keybindings, readline keybindings and standard windows keybindings at the same time. What I can’t handle is: having to use command + C on one Mac and control + C on Windows to copy, but then in some cases you do use “control” on both OS-es, and sometimes control and alt are switched … It’s because they are similar but different that it’s such a mess trying to get proficient in both at the same time.

Eh. Windows has its share of annoyances, but once I have set it up to my liking my desktop workflow is very similar to my KDE setup, and WSL + Windows Terminal gives me a functional Linux shell environment.

And at least on Windows I don’t have to deal with cmd/control/alt switcharoo messing up my muscle memory.

The correct way with a new computer with recent hardware is to install Debian Testing to get a recent kernel, firmware and mesa and stuff, but put the code name of the next release into your apt config instead of “testing”. So then when the next version is released, you can just stay on that, now stable, version.

Trixie just got released today though, so for the time being you can probably get away with using that.

A solution presumes there is a problem in the first place.

Nobody wants to steal your noisy shit machine.

Libre (from French) is sometimes used to solve the ambiguity of the word free in the English language, but it sounds kinda awkward in English and there’s certainly no consensus that this should be the official replacement, or that the term free even needs replacement.

Furthermore, the FSF who originally came up with the idea of “free software” still exists and is still called the Free Software Foundation, though Stallman uses both terms interchangeably.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

That’s not necessarily the fault of systemd.

No, but the error being hard to debug, and not being able to cancel the timeout as it’s occurring, is though.

Anyway that is been fixed on modern systems

No, I’ve had it happen more recently (I wanna say less than a month ago) with network mounts and random systemd controlled desktop processes that refuse to die.

Everybody gangsta until A stop job is running for…

As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?

Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?

Let’s say you want to start ssh-agent when you login to your desktop environment. Well, there’s a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you’d have to do it another way (autostart script or something).

So you’re considering the 22H2 builds et al. separate versions, I just consider them service packs. They come with the regular updates, and the user experience doesn’t significantly change. I couldn’t ever tell you what “build” of Windows 10 or 11 I was on, but I usually know pretty well which distro version I am on.

But I guess it’s true that they contain more feature updates than typical Linux updates.

I think you misunderstood. Windows 10 was released in 2015, and will have general support for all versions until October 2025. That’s 10 years.

The current version of Mint, 22.1, was released in January 2025, and will receive support until April 2029. That’s 4 years.

Had you installed the latest version of Mint in 2015, it would have been EOL in 2019. Had you installed Windows 10 in 2015, it would only be EOL later this year.

but when you explicitly state you are against it in the README of your project that is just wild

It’s called a dogwhistle: they’re letting other racist scumbags know that they are also racist scumbags and that their racist scumbag views are welcome, without saying anything overtly racist scumbag-y.

I use Arch myself (BTW :p), but I wouldn’t really recommend that for users who freshly migrated over from Windows.

Yes, there are ways to get extended support (on Windows too btw), but a thing that should also be kept in mind is that “support” only means security patches and bugfixes, and not feature upgrades. There is also no guaranteed continued hardware support, nor guaranteed support from third party applications. On Ubuntu there’s at least the HWE kernel, but that’s also limited in time.

It’s not criticism btw, it’s just worth mentioning that the support model on Linux looks a bit different than what you get with Windows, and users should generally be encouraged to keep up with the latest release of their chosen distribution.

True, but often the distributions have an upgrade plan (for free). In example you can install an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade 4 years later to the next major LTS release. However, sometimes this has problems, because so much time and changes are in between. This is for sure.

Yes you can and should upgrade, which is what I was trying to say really. It’s less set and forget as in “just let it update and it will keep on trucking for 10 years”.

There are distributions with longer support period. Debian comes to my mind. But I don’t know how long and there were 10 year supported distributions too.

I think only the enterprise distributions (RHEL etc) do 10 year support, but they are not very usable for a desktop system, and I can tell from experience you start to run into compatibility and support issues with software if you actually use it for that long.

Debian is ± 5 years by the way.

foot is such a lovely little program. It has everything I want for a terminal emulator: it launches instantly, it has zero lag, no fluff, excellent font rendering, excellent copy/paste handling, excellent compatibility, and it’s easily configurable and themable via a sensible, well documented config file.

TFW I realize I am a foot fetishist … 😮

If you install Linux Mint today, you’ll still be able to update it in october and beyond, for the foreseeable future

One caveat: Linux distributions, even LTS variants, usually have a shorter support period than Windows, after which you have to upgrade your distribution, which is much like doing a Windows upgrade.

A particular version of Linux Mint, the example you mentioned, is supported for 4 years, whereas Windows 10 was supported for 10 years.

Not really the same scenario. PCs that could run Windows 7 could usually upgrade to 10, people were just reluctant to do so, partly also because 8 and 8.1 were such disasters. Eventually, everyone just moved on.

Today, a lot of 10 users would upgrade to 11 if they could, but their older-but-still-fine hardware is simply being cut off from Windows support.

Counterpoint: To install this program curl ... | sudo bash