I’ve been using Linux since 1998 on and off, and in the last few years, exclusively. I like Debian-Testing, and Linux Mint. Nothing else seems to work as I want it, it seems.

They’re trying to kill counterculture. Pixelfed is also banned at meta’s servers.

From the developer, he said that Wayland has no way to support these features, not that he won’t support them. You need the right APIs to develop this app, and while X11 seems to have them, Wayland does not.

Linux Mint’s Cinnamon has an involved gesture pref panel, but it’s not per app, it’s system-wide. If the suggestion from the other user for touche/touchegg don’t work due to being designed for X11, you’re out of luck. What you’re asking is a bit too specialized and from what I read from the creator of touchegg on his github, is that Wayland has no way to support these features. So don’t expect it in the future either.

Under Linux, the recommended route is KVM/Qemu, with Virt-Manager as the GUI front-end for them. You will need to follow tutorials to install it correctly, as it requires special steps, e.g. adding them to specific usergroups. But once it works, it works well.

Things can go bad during an upgrade, for example the new mint 22.1 introduced some booting delay bugs that currently fills the linux mint forum with complaints. Not a big problem, and not for all users, but small hiccups can exist. So if you want to upgrade, do have a working usb. Otherwise, change the ssd inside the laptop. Or, get a “new”, refurbished laptop. I recently got an 8 GB ram laptop for $150, works fine, plenty fast for Mint, great condition, no complaints.

Which version of Mint did you install? The new version has zfs modules disabled by default, because they were creating long booting problems on people who were not even using zfs. I stumbled on the problem too, I had mint installed on a usb stick (full install) and on SOME computers, when booted, it would try to load zfs stuff, taking 1.30 minutes of trying to do some systemd job for it.I removed all zfs stuff and nothing got broken.

Ungoogled Chromium doesn’t autoupdate though. Chrome and Chromium do.

Linux Mint will work wonderfully on it. It has 4 GB RAM and a cpu that scores 1220 CPU points on passmark benchmark. That’s more than enough to run Mint with Cinnamon – which is very Windows-like, and the recommended distro for windows users.

I’d suggest you install it for him, and you configure it as it should (go through the prefs). Also, disable a couple of startup things found in the utility in the prefs, e.g. the wizard and the reports, to save ram. To save even more ram, install chrome for your friend (I know, I know, Firefox is there, but Chrome uses less ram on youtube – almost 2/3s). On a 4 gb laptop, for someone who specifically wants to use youtube, that matters. And along with it, ublock origin on the medium level, so it can block youtube ads.

In my area in Greece, the water is not safe, my brother who used to work in the water containers says it’s full of rats. We all buy bottles. It would be nice to be environmentally conscious about it, but there’s no choice about it.

That seems like a policy kit issue. Maybe the system doesn’t have the permissions to do it automatically. XFce usually has such problems in other distros, but I haven’t heard one on mint with cinnamon.

Another thing to look at is what graphics card you’re using. With nvidia you can get some weird suspend issues.

Finally, install a newer kernel to see if that fixes the issue.

That’s just the state of things. I have experienced this as well, trying to copy a 160 GB usb stick to another one (my old itunes library). Windows manages fine, but neither Linux nor MacOS do it properly. They crawl, and in macos’ case, it gets much slower as time goes by, and I had to stop the transfer. Overall, it’s how these things are implemented. It’s ok for a few gigabytes, but not a good case for many small files (e.g. 3-5 mb each) with many subfolders, and many GBs overall. Seems to me that some cache is overfilling, while windows is more diligent to clear up that cache in time, before things get into a crawl. Just a weak implementation for both Linux and MacOS IMHO, and while I’m a full time Linux user, I’m not afraid to say it how I experienced it under a debian and ubuntu.

Epson’s software is quite sub par in recognizing their own hardware. Over here their own utility can’t find my epson scanner, for example. Although it does work if I use it the IP address. Something in their network detection code is just erroneous. As for the epson printer itself, it stopped connecting to my wifi, no matter what. I now have it connected via an ethernet cable, and things work better. So definitely try an ethernet cable.

If all have problems, then it’s something that likely can’t really be fixed via the forum. It’s either a bug, or a not-fully featured feature yet. Qemu often has 3D problems anyway when enabled. 3D is a really hard problem to get right. Stay with 2D acceleration, or try the latest VMWare to see if you can use 3D with it instead. Otherwise, install on bare metal.

According to the releases so far, and how far ahead the code has come, and how many bugs it has still, i’d say that 1.0 will probably come around August or September. I’m running Cosmic and it’s still not there, too many rough edges.

Yes, it is, for two reasons:

1. Affinity company has replied to my request saying that there won’t be a Linux version, ever.
2. The hacks that exist to run Affinity on Linux are a moving rug, newer wine of affinity versions break stuff all the time. Don’t rely on it.

Your best bet is to run Gimp3 (which is excellent), or Photopea online. Learn Photopea so you can know Photoshop if in the future a future employer requires it, while for your own projects, learn Gimp3. I run the official Appimage without any issue.

The only one that doesn’t have it at all, or don’t plan for it, is lxde and mate. Every other DE has some form of support coming over.

Also, I forgot to say, to save ram on ram-starved PCs, use a single color background (my favorite is #317E9F). Or if you’re going to use an image, make sure its pixel size is exactly the screen res. If you use a 4k image (that Mint usually defaults on), on a small screen resolution, you’re wasting anywhere from 50 to 100 MB of RAM (because you count it uncompressed in memory, not how much storage it takes). Little known tip!

If you have the funds for it, or your friends help you with the purchase, get some usb sticks for $9 each (Mint requires 20 GB of space with a few apps in it, so a 32GB stick is enough, but it won’t be enough for long if they play with Steam, so a 64+GB stick is preferable), and install Mint on one of them (I use this https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/917k6WqTLSL.__AC_SX300_SY300_QL70_FMwebp_.jpg , because it’s tiny, it’s really annoying to use a large usb stick permanently). Make sure you create a /boot partition (512 MB, fat32, with the esp/boot flags on it), then a 4 GB swap partition, and then the / partition for the rest (unless Mint does that automatically for you, make sure there’s a swap).

Then configure it to be as user friendly and as clean as possible (I configure Cinnamenu to be clean of useless things, like emojis menu items etc, there’s a good cinnamon menu editor installed by default but they don’t expose it on the menus). Go through all the prefs to get sane defaults for everything. Install using the command line some apps (they will use the flatpaks, but it’s best to get the important apps from the repo): gimp, steam, a few time-wasting games as in my screenshot above, inkscape, kdenlive, shotcut, audacity, vlc, xsane, scribus, homebank, foliate, krita, htop/neofetch for your own enjoyment, and then from the web, download the .deb files for onlyoffice (it has better compatibility with MS formats than libreoffice), chromium or chrome (for those who can’t live without it), Obsidian, latest Blender, and localsend (they can send files between phones, and other OSes that the app is installed too), and Xournal++ if any of your friends have a touchscreen laptop. That’s enough to get anyone started.

Once you’re 100% sure no more changes are required, dd/clone that one usb stick to all the other ones (so you don’t have to do the installation multiple times). Then, give to friends.

Linux Mint is what you need. Don’t put them on rolling release distros, they all have troubles after a bad update (it happens to all of them eventually). You want a stable distro for newbies. So that would mean either Debian (which unfortunately doesn’t have many GUI panels to do admin stuff apart from what the DE offers), or Mint (which does).

I wouldn’t suggest Ubuntu or fedora because they use about 2 GB of RAM on a cold boot, which means that you need an 8 GB PC to do stuff comfortably. With Mint, if you remove a couple of unneeded services, it starts at 900 MB of RAM, which would run on a 4 GB laptop easily when you load lots of web browsing tabs. Your friends would probably try Linux first on their old laptops, instead of their current ones too, from fear that it would nuke their Windows, so the ram usage matters.

If a friend of yours have a too-old laptop/PC with 2 GB of RAM, then I’d suggest you install the Q4OS distro on it (with the Trinity Desktop), with Falkon or Chromium as browsers (they use less ram than firefox). It boots at 350 MB of RAM, and it comes with an easier-to-use interface than other lite Linux distros (e.g. puppy linux, antix, DamnSmallLinux etc).

Another thing to know about Mint is that it’s one of the few distros that can install to, and boot from a USB stick. Basically, you create a live USB stick, you boot from it, and then you insert a second usb stick (64 GB or more), and then you EJECT it from the desktop when it auto-mounts. It will then allow you to install Mint on that second usb stick! So for friends that don’t want to dual boot, or they’re afraid their Windows will get nuked, you can get them to boot and try Mint that way (with their changes SAVED, unlike with the live usb that loses the changes after a boot). I’ve been running from USB on two machines, where I can’t easily replace their slow hard drives, without problems (although the emmc inside goes bad after about a year if used a lot – it’s more of a semi-permanent solution, but great to introduce friends and family to Linux without nuking Windows).

One suggestion would be to install for them the Cinnamenu menu instead of the default Mint one. It’s both cleaner, and a more modern take on the old Windows menu, no useless stuff or duplication of options to confuse newbies – CLEAN interface: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/391/944/352/704/129/original/7e2ced150dbc8932.png

Also, wait for the Mint 22.1 to be released in a few days, and change the theme to the new “Cinnamon” (it’s their new theme, but they haven’t enabled it by default – it looks great).

Also, because Mint is based on Ubuntu, 99% of the tutorials or fixes online for ubuntu, also apply to Mint.