As for the –apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).
As I said before, it does work for system updates, the only exception being the kernel. The –apply-live flag was added for that exact reason, to avoid the need for an unnecessary reboot.
It looks like you’re still using PulseAudio? I’d highly recommend switching to PipeWire+WirePlumber instead, installing it should make your earbuds work automatically.
Give Zorin a try. It’s based on Ubuntu but even more user friendly - so much so that my elderly mother has no issues using it, she even prints and scans (a Brother MFD) and has no issues.
As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc
May I ask why though? One of the biggest advantages of using a MacBook is the performance-battery efficiency. If you’re going to get a Mac mini and loading Linux, you lose that advantage.
Unless you’re looking specifically for an ARM64 machine for whatever reason, I think an AMD mini PC, say something like the Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX would be technically a better option - you get dual NVMe, dual 2.5G network ports, USB 4.0, Oculink for even more b/w than Thunderbolt, and far more I/O options in general. Not to mention, excellent Linux support.
Anti-cheat support in general has been a thing in Linux since the past couple of years, thanks to the efforts of Valve and the Steam Deck’s popularity. But not every game works though, depending on the anti-cheat system used and it’s implementation, some effort from the dev might be needed to make it compatible. areweanticheatyet.com tracks the current status of these games, and www.protondb.com is also a good reference in general to check Linux game compatibility.
If you’re talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn’t touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we’ve had Storage Sense on, but it’s been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we’d get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.