Ask your Linux group. Seriously. They should know best what kinds of issues their ‘users’ frequently face and what kind of information there is.
I learned Linux by doing. Set up a webserver, set up a network share, assemble a RAID with 2 old HDDs. Install Steam and play around a bit. Try LaTex and write your next homework assignment with it. Set up a Python / R / C++ development environment. All of that is good practice and you’ll understand the concepts and specific issues once you do it yourself. Imho that’s better than a theoretical course. You can do this in VMs or find old hardware. Some people in such groups have good connections.
Also a university library should have some free (for you) material (books) on Linux.
It’s relatively alright for something that’s called unstable. There is also testing which is tested for at least 10 days. And you can mix and match, but that’s not recommended either.
I wouldn’t put it on my server. And I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t okay with fixing the occasional hiccup. But I’ve been using it for years and I like it.
However, mind that it’s not supported and they do not pay attention to security fixes.
Lots of people gave great advice. Let me sum a bit of that up.
Flatpak
No error means success. You might want to install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak to make it available in gnome-software. I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible. Those packages are maintained by the debian community and tied into the rest of the system. Flatpaks are not.
sudo
What would you like? That is kinda intended behaviour and an integral part of security. But you can have it remember the password for some time. Or ask for a different password.
FDE
I think a clean install is the quickest way to fix this. You can also get the other things right while at it.
DE
You can choose the desktop environment while installing Linux. You chose the default Gnome Desktop. It’s designed more like Apple or Android tablets. I quite like it. You don’t have that menu blocking space on the monitor. Instead you just bump your mouse to that top left corner or press the windows key and you have a fullscreen menu with your favorites. You can also directly start typing the first letters of the application you want and hit enter and start is, without lifting your fingers from the keyboard and it’s way quicker and more streamlined than clicking on things in a windows start menu. You can have an addidional dock somewhere at the left or the bottom with an additional gnome extension like this or what other people suggested. But if you’d like it like windows, why don’t you try the KDE destop? I think you’d be more comfortable with that if you’re looking for something alike the windows experience.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu regularly does some stupid things. I’ve been using Debian for quite some time. I suppose the differences for you are minor anyways and you could have it look the same if you found out which gnome quick-launch bar to install or if you used the KDE desktop instead.
Yeah, I had sound and printing break on Windows, too. And my mom’s Windows PC breaks every year and a half. I’d say go for linux if you’re comfortable with that, it’s pretty robust. Or MacOS that also seems not to break.
(Of course something like Arch or EndeavourOS is more complicated and may break. Fedora, Debian, Mint … will be a better choice for stability. My Debian install runs without mayor issues for 5 years now. If you don’t do silly stuff an mess with the system, they’ll outperform windows.)
Most people choose an OS because they’re used to that specific workflow and know the quirks and how to get around. That’s why many peoole use Microsoft, not because it’s better. School/College/University is a good time to try something. After that you’re pretty much stuck.
The X font server has been deprecated like 10 years ago. I doubt you’ll find it as an option in a modern distribution. Nowadays fonts are rendered by the client (application) with something like the Cairo library (if I’m not mistaken).
With GStreamer you can build a pipeline you like, you don’t need to use RDP, you can send uncompressed frames plain over network like in the video. I’m not an expert on graphics processing. SLI or NVLink are (I think) proprietary parallel processing interconnects. But NVidia didn’t invent parallel processing. I’m sure there are other solutions available. Though, I somehow doubt those will help you because they’re generally tailored to other (HPC/datacenter/simulation) purposes and not for gaming. And I think they use something like Infiniband for that and not thunderbolt.
With the speed, mind the first article is 5 years old. And I’m not sure how the hardware in the second one compares to what Linus uses or if it’s even the same generation of Thunderbolt. It’s probably gotten way faster since. I can’t try because only 1 device I own supports thunderbolt at all.
I think transferring files over thunderbolt networking or low latency video is nothing new. It can be easily replicated. And setting up 2 gstreamer pipelines is just two (lengthy) commands. Replicating NVlink is another thing, though. We probably need an expert on graphics drivers to tell if that already exists or how difficult that would be to implement. Most people will probably just fit 2 graphics cards into one computer or buy one faster GPU because that is both cheaper and way faster than connecting them in 2 separate computers with added latency.
(MPI would be an example of an open standard to do parallel computing with arbitrary interconnects.)
Not necessarily. There are other operating systems and frameworks for embedded devices. Especially for commercial products. It doesn’t have to be something like Linux and GPL code.
This is a list of many other choices with many of them having non-copyleft licenses. And a thermostat is a comparatively simple device. They could also have implemented most things themselves and just taken a network-stack to connect it to the outside world. (I think network is something that is very complex and companies just buy a solution instead of writing all of that code.)
Hehe. I think the majority of people (who haven’t stumbled here by accident) don’t really need that reminder.
I’m a bit unsure. I don’t really mind stealing from big companies. Even more so if they make all those stupid business decisions and start to become more and more greedy. I personally think it’s a bit unethical to pay for stolen goods. That is fencing. But I think everyone should decide for themselves how they’d like to handle this.
If Nextflix only licenses a show for temporary use by me, it’s more a license violation than a proper analogy to stealing that would apply. But maybe I shoud read a book and not watch that much TV anyways.
Probably a bit less than other people if you take an average between the groups of people because they spend their time tinkering with other stuff and software development takes time. If you do it as a hobby that eats into the time you could use for other hobbies. But I’m not sure if this holds true once you do that as your day job.
And you will be able to upgrade a desktop computer. You could at some point swap the GPU or buy another stick of RAM for $60, whereas most things are soldered in laptops nowadays. Oftentimes they even solder the RAM to move it closer to the CPU and make the laptop a bit cheaper since it now requires less mechanical brackets/parts.
Also a laptop will almost never get the same performance because it’s more difficult to get all the heat out and it’ll switch to a lower clockrate once all the heat builds up in that small form-factor.
But it can be worth it if you need one device that can do both gaming and be carried around. Desktop replacements are quite popular. But they come with exactly those downsides. And it may be or might not be cheaper than buying one ultrabook plus a pc that’s tailored to gaming. It’s always a compromise, though.
The relays don’t have access to the content, it’s encrypted. But the exit-nodes can see what you’re transmitting. They just don’t know who you are because they got your data forwarded by the relays.
I think Hetzner wants you to tell them you’ve removed it. They did as requested and took down the VPS and disabled it. It’s now in your hands.
I myself wouldn’t ignore such a letter. It’s now just asking you politely. If you continue they need to make the choice if it’s worth pursuing you. I don’t have any good insight if and under what circumstances they do. I would comply, remove said content and probably not reply to them. It’s unlikely to make it better for you if you talk to people targeting you. And I wouldn’t keep the logs around as they requested. Accidents happen, files get deleted, nobody is perfect.
Dudes, Duderinas and people from all around… While I said something in the meta-debate here, I’m not engaging in the underlying argument. What are you trying to accomplish here? The people you are talking about are suffering horrible atrocities. All you can think about is hating on each other on the internet… (There has to be a better way to deal with the situation.)