But what is a trusted provider? How can you trust it? How sure are you that you’re not being MitM? Have you fully manually verified that there’s no funky flags in curl like -k, that the url is using SSL, that it’s a correct url and not pointing at something malicious, etc, etc, etc. There are a lot of manual steps you must verify using this approach, whereas using a package manager all of them get checked automatically, plus some extra checks like hundreds of people validating the content is secure.

To do apt get from an unknown repo, you first need to convince the person to execute root commands they don’t understand on their machine to add that unknown repo, if you can convice someone to run an unsafe command with root credentials then the machine is already compromised.

I get your point, random internet scripts are dangerous but random internet packages can also dangerous. But that’s a false equivalence because there are lots of safeguards to the packages in the usual way people install them, but less than 0 safeguards to the curl|bash. In a similar manner, if this was a post talking about the dangers of fireworks and how you can blow yourself up using them your answer is “but someone can plant a bomb in the mall I go to, or steal the codes for a nuclear missile and blow me up anyways”.

Last year I would have said Arch. I have been running it for over 15 years with some small breaks to try stuff, or with some machines that have company issued OS. But I have been toying with NixOS, and honestly I’m loving it. If I had to choose only one and couldn’t change it it would have to be Arch, I know I can get 5 years with it easily, but if I was setting a new system today it would almost assuredly be NixOS, I might regret that 3 years down the line when there’s something I can’t get to work, but the more I play around, the less likely I think that would be, and the more comfortable I feel that I will eventually migrate to NixOS fulltime

But those are two very different things, I can very easily give you a one liner using curl|bash that will compromise your system, to get the same level of compromise through a proper authenticated channel such as apt/pacman/etc you would need to compromise either their private keys and attack before they notice and change them or stick malicious code in an official package, either of those is orders of magnitude more difficult than writing a simple bash script.

You didn’t knew that the tool to handle URLs written in C (very creatively named C-Url) was handling URLs? It’s also written in C if you didn’t knew.

For this to work you need a display to send through the network, but that display needs not be a physical one. So depending on your definition it can be run headless. If you meant without it being plugged to a display then yes, if you meant without having graphical stack installed then no (there would be no point to streaming display without a display).

It works brilliantly on my Linux host with a 7800 XT, I think you might have an unrelated issue.

Astro A50 that I got from work. It sucks, every once in a while it just refuses to work and I need to plug it into my wife’s Windows PC to update the firmware to get it to work again. Audio and mic quality are okay, but that issue makes me definitely not recommend it for Linux users.

Sure, but which OSD criteria is being broken here?

Open source and FOSS are two different things though. I think Mattermost is open source, just not FOSS and the licencing they mentioned might be wrong (GPL is invasive so they couldn’t have a closed source part IIRC), but it’s still open source as the code is freely available.

That’s a very cool idea, seems great for receipts and quick stuff.

If you’re going to use Arch you should use Arch. One of the biggest advantages for Arch is the AUR which can cause many issues on Arch based distros that are not Arch.

That being said, for a media center, if you’re not used to, I wouldn’t go with Arch, Debian is a much better choice since you’re already used to it and should be good for that use case.

I’ve also used Nvidia for years without issues, that doesn’t mean there aren’t pain points. For example the open source driver is severely worse in performance than the proprietary one, but the proprietary one lacks some features used by some Wayland compositors, which is why for example sway requires a special flag to be passed if you’re using Nvidia proprietary drivers.

I do intend on installing Linux on this computer.

In that case I strongly suggest you look at an AMD GPU. Nvidia is usable on Linux, but not pleasant.

How does it work on Android? One of my main use cases for Nextcloud is to be able to access some of my pdfs on my phone, the app seems to be focused on uploading which is something that while I do sometimes from my phone is much less often.

That would make Mint unstable. That is exactly what unstable means in Linux context. There are debian based rolling-release distros, including Debian Sid. This is one of the reasons people choose Arch, because it’s a rolling release you never have to worry about version.

There’s a good chance you might break stuff by upgrading major version like you fear, and that’s why it doesn’t happen automatically. That being said it should be safe, but good on you to prepare backups.

Please research the meaning of stability when applied to Linux before parroting stuff. Also, who mentioned Arch?

If you know that that’s the right driver to install, what is your question?

I usually give detailed responses, but honestly the correct response here is RTFM. The short answer is to install nvidia-580xx-dkms.

Arch wiki is such a great place that has the answer to most technical questions you might want to ask. I strongly dislike the idea that Arch is for advanced users, but it does expect you to read the documentation (which is why I dislike stuff like Manjaro that try to make Arch “accessible”, but end up leaving people in similar situations without even knowing where to look for the solution to their issues).

Ansible.

I use docker for most of the services and Ansible to configure them. In the future I’ll migrate the server system to NixOS and might slowly migrate my Ansible to NixOS, but for the time being Ansible is working with relative ease.

My main computer at work is Linux, I do have a Windows build box where I compile code for Windows, and to make my life easier I usually develop it there as well. But outside of platform specific code, or code related to a product that’s Windows only, I don’t have any issues.

As for other software Teams, slack, zoom, Google meeting and docs work well enough that I can use them daily without issues.

At a previous job for some reason they wanted me to use Windows, which was absurd since I worked on the backend of a site which would only be deployed to Linux, didn’t last long in that job after that was made official.

In short, as long as my main machine is Linux, I don’t mind having to have a Windows machine to do Windows stuff. But I get annoyed out of my mind if I’m either forced to use Windows as my main OS (it’s just not ergonomic for me), especially if there’s no reason for it.