For Mint in particular, there is a difference. There are some ubuntu packages they don’t want applied, and the command line does apply them. While their packagekit gui app, doesn’t. They always suggest we use their app. Also, the app updates spices, and flatpaks.

If you’re on ubuntu-based distro, install the ubudustudio package for pipewire that seems to fix a few things differently than other distros.

I don’t know the root of your ills on your server, but I have an interesting story to share (shared by my husband who was an engineer at the company mentioned below).

Back in 1998, the engineers at Be,Inc (who were developing BeOS, a beloved OS at the time) were experiencing kernel panics right after 7 am, on a specific computer. All of the crashes at around the same, while the computer was running tests all night. It had become a big mystery because they couldn’t find the bug.

It took them days, but they decided to sit around at 7 am to see what was happening. They saw that a single, strong sun ray was entering the room from the window, and was directly hitting the PC’s floppy drive (the PC was not completely closed up with its cover, since it was a test machine). They found that the sun ray would alter some bits in the electronics and what not, and would crash the kernel! :o)

Thank you for the lucid reply. I already got a DELL 5640 16" laptop in the interim. It ticks all my boxes except the large size and the off centered trackpad. Otherwise it’s ok. Nothing amazing, but it’s fast and with a lot of RAM for the $765 euros that I paid.

No, there isn’t, however, NixOS is made by ex-freebsd people, and some of the philosophy has bled through there. Have a look at it.

Sounds good, thx!

I understand. BTW, I am running Linux on my M1 macbook with UTM Qemu, and linux is really, really slow under emulation (faster if you run arm versions). Even on M3/M4.

The CPU generation is important because older ones don’t clock faster than my M1 macbook. If I’m going to buy something new, it better be faster than what I already have. GPU is also important, because before the 11th gen, 4:2:2 10bit video didn’t have video encoding/decoding, which I need. Also the trackpad is terrible (I have an X280 thinkpad), so is its speaker quality afaik. Thinkpads were great laptops for an older generation. I bought one because everyone was raving about them. Except its screen and keyboard, everything else sucks on it. It won’t even support some usb-c chargers (while other laptops don’t have an issue).

I already have 5 laptops. Laptops that range from 2800 passmark points to 5500 points (older Chromebooks usually clock between 1400 and 4000 points, so yours is probably in that range). I use these laptops as testbeds mostly, not as my main laptops for work/browsing. I need something faster than my M1 Macbook Air (which clocks 14,000 points – and that’s already 5 years old). So a 6th refurbished, old, slow laptop won’t do the job.

In fact, funnily enough, I’ve done the same mistake with video cameras back in the day. I was buying cheaper stuff, thinking that one feature here, or one feature there would make out for not buying a more expensive camera. They weren’t enough. I had to wait to 2024 to actually find the video camera that I was looking for in 2011.

Same for phones. Even after the popularization of the iphone and android, I still didn’t like them. I had to wait until about 2018-or-so, to feel that they had matured to the level I envisioned them 15 years earlier!

I guess I have certain ideas on what I want from hardware and anything less doesn’t cut it…

Did you even read the post with my required specs? :)

btw, can you really replace the ssd/ram on these xps 13s? I found one afor $1700, and in greece they ask for $2500 if you spec it with 32gb of ram. But if I can replace it myself easily, that would be nice.

This is very useful, thank you. I will investigate!

I’m in Greece. The price it gives me as an absolute minimum for that spec (plus power adapter, etc) is 1707 euros. And I added the better screen, to match the macbook air, plus the usb adapters (it has four slots). Then the price ballooned to $2050 euros.

Thank you, I needed to hear that…

This is absolutely normal. FAT/exFAT do not support unix permissions (let alone Linux ext4’s any special flags etc). So each time you copy files there, the permissions and all other flags are lost or get bad in general.

To save your permissions you have two options:

1. Zip/targzip or xz your linux files before you copy them on your fat drives. Preferably on files that overall aren’t larger than 1 gb, just to avoid other weird problems.

2. Use ext4 on your external drives.

Maybe your computer has hardware problems that manifest at random times as software problems. I personally got a Beelink mini PC for $160 (16 GB of ram), and it worked perfectly with Linux first time, no issues thereafter.

There is a mintupgrade app you’d need to install it run it from the terminal, and it lets you upgrade the OS. However, waiting just 4-5 days to get the 22.2 is always the best idea.

Konqueror still has a file manager component that is not the same as Dolphin.

There are not many complex app that are stable under Wine. Notepad++ is so-so stable under it, but things like Affinity Photo is not. I don’t expect FilemakerPro to be either. And you don’t want to lose data with a crash… being a database and all.

Which features of Opus do you specifically use that aren’t part of regular file managers? KDE’s file manager doesn’t do what you need? Other ones to try are Konqueror (probably the closest to Opus, it should be part of Debian’s repo: sudo apt install konqueror), PCManFM (also part of debian’s repo), Krusader, and Double Commander (found online, third party).

As for Windows apps, do NOT try to run them via Wine. Even if they will install (unlikely most of the time), they will be crashy. Games work because they don’t use much of the Windows API, but apps do, and most of the API is not implemented under WINE. So your best bet is to run a Windows VM. You can setup a “spice” to share files between your VM and your Linux system, and then run these apps under a free version of Windows (you don’t have to pay for a license these days).