On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it’s available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It’s not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.
I use my Yubikeys all the time in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Linux Mint - a Yubikey 5 NFC and a Yubikey 5C NFC (mostly with Firefox). I have never had any problems with them. Mint is Ubuntu-based so they ought to work in Ubuntu. Sorry I can’t advise you on why yours isn’t working, but it should definitely be possible to get it working.
In my experience, every computer is faster with Linux than with Windows. But if this measures just the processor performance on similar tasks I guess it’s news.
Discovery was always the thing that made streaming services better than buying recordings individually. If these services stop being good for finding new music, then there’s not much reason to keep using them.
I find the same thing with music streaming on Spotify. I used to discover lots of new music I liked on it but these days I can’t get it to generate an interesting playlist. It’s songs I already know interspersed with things that are boring. Seems like the recommendations got worse.
You’re not missing anything really. For some reason some people like to say that Mint is a good distro for beginners and imply that you should change away from it when you’re more “advanced”. This is really nonsense. Mint is a good distro. I switched to Tumbleweed because I found one or two things I couldn’t do so easily in Mint, but if you’re not having trouble there’s really no reason to switch. And with tools like Flatpak and Distrobox available these days there’s even less reason to distro hop.
I use both Firefox and Chrome-based browsers and I haven’t come across any major differences in functionality. What are all these things Chrome can do that Firefox can’t?