I think the main issue here is the mindset of “installing a new distro will fix it”. Unfortunately, a lot of people online push that idea. If it’s broken on Mint and Bazzite, it’s probably a generic Linux issue.

The second issue with Plasma sounds like it could be related to Wayland and fractional scaling.

And if any gaming will be involved I’d probably steer clear of either of them, since the available graphics driver will likely be outdated rather quickly.

Ubuntu LTS (and therefore Linux Mint) gets updated graphics drivers between releases, so the situation is not too bad. I’d say it’s good enough for most people. You only really have an issue if you want to buy a brand-new AMD/Intel GPU.

For comparison, Debian 13 (and LMDE) currently ships the Nvida 550 driver, while Ubuntu 24.04 ships the 580 driver.

Upstream, the Fedora KDE Plasma edition is also doing well. Nice to see that within the first release after promotion to a full edition.

I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239

That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.

The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/1l707yc/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.

Perhaps also an off-site backup ;-)

It’s either +44% (from $70) or -31% (from $101). Percentages are weird…

Yes, and it should probably be cheaper in Poland. But it’s really 17% more expensive in this case, not 44% (or 30% as the article calculates).

The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity

Peak competence there.

The Polish price includes 23% VAT, no?

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

How is this too long? I would consider it a reasonable amount of time to receive security updates on a computer.

I have a notebook that I bought in 2012. It can run Ubuntu LTS 24.04, which is supported until 2034, without issue. There is no indication that the next release will stop supporting this hardware. I don’t see why Microsoft couldn’t provide this.

Yeah, I looked into ARM or RISC-V options for a NAS, but ended up going with x86. Upstream Linux support is just a hard requirement for me. As the author points out, the support that you get from the SBC manufacturers is lacking at best.

Yes, that makes sense. Unfortunately, as far as I know, Mint doesn’t provide a list of obsolete or deprecated packages. Even the upstream Ubuntu release notes (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-04-lts-noble-numbat-release-notes/39890 for 24.04 / LM 22) don’t list removed packages.

What you can do after the upgrade is query for obsolete packages on your system using apt list ?obsolete. It’s generally recommended to remove those.

It seems that xplayer was abandoned after the last release in 2022. It is not present in the LM 22 repos. Maybe you still have a version installed from LM21?

I would expect the change in the default app to be mentioned in the release notes, but I can’t find anything on the removal of the package in LM22: https://linuxmint.com/rel_wilma.php

Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).

Rust actually doesn’t guarantee that there are no memory leaks. I think the more important memory safety improvements are regarding use after free, out-of-bounds accesses, null pointer issues, and double free problems.

For me, it’s mostly interesting because it brings automatic tiling to a desktop environment. System76 has previously implemented this as an extension for Gnome, but they haven’t been too happy with that approach.

I think would also be good for the Linux Desktop community to have more than 2 strong desktop environments. Hopefully this would incentivize app developers to account for more than just a singe DE.

Ok, so you didn’t even get to the bootloader (Step 4 here: https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/boot.html). Indeed it seems most likely that your USB drive was not created correctly. I would go with the steps I pointed out above to debug the issue.

and while it was recognized in BIOS, it wouldn’t boot from it.

What exactly happened here? This approach should usually have worked.

The first thing I would suggest to do is verify the checksum of the ISO that you downloaded. I think you can use 7zip to calculate the SHA256 checksum on Windows.

Instead of trying to manually create a bootable USB disk, I would suggest to try a different tool, e.g. Fedora Image Writer.

If possible, you could also try a different USB stick and a different computer to troubleshoot the issue.

Interesting, I didn’t know that but it seems like Wayland is indeed CSD by default. However, all relevant compositors except for Mutter support xdg-decoration (https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1). So in practice it’s still only a Gnome issue.

No, that’s Gnome, not Wayland. KDE still prefers SSD on Wayland.