"We're here about the homicide. Where's the body?"

"Nope, ain't nothing here except 60 litres of strawberry smoothie".

1. I usually stick with distros that have large userbases. I've tried smaller and niche distros before, and inevitably they stop being maintained, or move in a direction I don't like. The larger distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, have more resources (people, time, money) to spend on testing updates, and have reliable update schedules. When I was younger I didn't care about that kind of thing, but these days I use my PC almost exclusively for work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, I need my PC to not break when I update it.

Another technique I use is to go to the vendor site for software I use and look at which Linux distros they officially support. Usually they will publish at least an Ubuntu package, sometimes a universal deb file that works on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. Sometimes an RPM package for Fedora/CentOS too. This is getting less relevant these days with Appimage files and Flapak images that work the same across all distros.

It's natural to get bored or frustrated with one distro and want to try out others. Imagine if Microsoft made many different flavours of Windows that each look and operate differently, everyone who is bored and frustrated with default Windows would be trying them all out, comparing them, debating the pros and cons, communities would form around common favourites.

I have a small gaming PC that I use to test out other distros, I'm currently on Nobara, that I actually highly recommend for a gaming-focused distro.

2. This one is really hard to say. It depends on so many factors like what hardware you are running, what software you plan to run, how tech savvy you are, even your definition of what is an issue. Mint is very stable and easy to use, you may run into zero issues getting it installed, running VSCode, playing some Factorio. Or you might run into a small incompatibility between your GPU and the bundled kernel drivers and run into a whole world of hurt spending days tinkering on the command line with no usable graphics driver.

3. I believe Mint still comes with the Cinnamon Desktop, that is specifically designed to be familiar and easy for users transitioning from Windows. It's not super customisable, but I think it can do what you described. I'm not the best person to answer, I haven't used Mint or Cinnamon since 2012.

4. File extensions are optional in Linux for some kinds of files. Linux usually tries to identify a file type using a "Magic string", meaning it will read the first 8 to 16 bytes of the start of a file and will be able to tell with a great deal of accuracy what kind of file it is. Executables, drivers, shell scripts, and many others use this method and do not need a file extension. You can definitely still use extensions though. Eg, libre Office will still save documents with a doc extension (.odt). Often Linux will use a combination of both the magic string and the file extension to determine the file type. Eg, the magic string identifies it as an open office file, and the extension tells you it's a document kind of office file.

Your Linux photo editor will still save images with a .png or .jpeg extension, because these are the convention (and may be required if you will be opening those files on a different OS). Similarly, your project files created on Windows will still work fine on Linux (if the equivalent Linux app supports that file format).

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don't even know if you will like it, and don't know if you want to learn it's mechanics) then Arch wouldn't be my first choice.

It mentioned in the article that Meizu already has a phone with capacitive pads instead of buttons, screen-based speaker, 18w wireless charging and no USB port.

You might be interested in Raku. It is Perl6, or what used to be called Perl6, but it deviated too far away from the original perl and it ended up with a different team of developers than perl 5, so they forked it, changed the name and turned it into a new language.

Sounds like it's actually a .doc file that has been renamed to a .docx for some reason. Real MS Word would probably still open it fine, but open source tools would fall over hard.

You mentioned you can't decompress it either. If it was a real .docx you could rename the extension to .zip and unzip it with any archiver to see the contents. If the archiver complains about the format, then it's not a real docx.

I got caught by this one today. I use the search feature all the time, and I don't know why I didn't notice that until today. I found the thing I was looking for, then wanted to go back to issues backlog for that repo, I clicked "Issues", that just took me to a filtered view of my search term within issues. Deleting my search term didn't help. I was clicking around for at least a minute before I realised there's actually no way back to the main repo from that page.

Long live LineageOS. I'm a big fan, I've been using it for years, while it was still called CyanogenMod. I used it on my HTC Magic in 2009, and my Galaxy S in 2011.

I haven't used nano since I discovered micro. https://micro-editor.github.io/

When I was growing up, the definitions kept changing.

I was born in 1986, and while in primary school I was told that makes me GenX. So I grew up thinking I was GenX. Then in high school, my teachers said actually anyone born after 1985 is GenY, so we're definitely GenY.

Then when year 2000 came around people started talking about a new generation of people who would "never remember the 20th century", or "never know a world without the internet", basically people born after 1997 so they grow up completely in the 2000s. They called them Millennials.

From then on the usage of "millennial" kept growing, starting to see it everywhere. Mostly by boomers complaining about millennials.

Around 2012 I stated seeing some youtubers around my age referring to themselves as millennials, I thought it was a joke, or a bad understanding. Then people started referring to me as a millennial. Someone who's whole childhood was in the 90s, how could I be a millennial, it defied the definition.

So I imagine my shock when I find now they've removed all trace of the usage of GenY, and retroactively applied "millennial" to mean anyone born after 1985. So maybe I am a millennial? I remember staying up late to celebrate with my parents and make sure our computer didn't crash at midnight on new years eve in 1999. I remember wondering why dragonballz wasn't on TV when the news was showing footage of American skyscrapers in 2001. Are those the things that make me a millennial? If so then what about the original definition? Those born 1997 or later won't remember those things, so now they're Zoomers? All this business makes me so confused.

Oh nice. I used lxqt a couple years ago while I was taking a break from KDE Plasma. I liked it, light and fast and simple. I didn't know v2.0 is coming out, I'm definitely going to try it.