Clearly the dark mode is the modern one! Jokes aside, I just realized that there THREE menu options on that toolbar: hamburger, kebab, and waffle! I realize they do different things, but no wonder people are confused by and scared of computers. Also, now I’m hungry!

You can reinstall the OS without overwriting your home partition or any other data partition. That’s always an option.

That’s right. zsh is POSIX compliant while fish is not. That’s the reason I switched to zsh from fish.

That’s right, to add a bit more color, any of Proton mail paid plans allows you to use Proton Bridge (which runs locally and speaks IMAP to your mail client).

Are you trying the terminal commands with sudo? You could also try logging in as root user with the password you used during setup.

It’s still a good thing. It’s an open specification, so anyone creating a design that is compliant can use software targeted at RISC-V. Just like you can buy USB-C flash drive from any manufacturer and use it with any OS that supports USB mass storage!

Missing an image?!

Quick example in straight C would be a cell in a matrix. The first pointer points to the row and the second pointer points to the cell in that row. This is am over simplification.

Thanks for the pointers, those will be a good reference. Now I just need to get started with a beginner how to!

I’d like to try Wayland + Sway. Do you have any recommendations for a starting config?

While this is a valid advice normally, OP has already tried this with Linux on a netbook and a dual boot chromebook. Since OP wants to do AV stuff it’s probably going to be a lot better experience with a desktop (assuming more capable than laptop) and monitor(s). Going another laptop route might be fine for learning but OP wants to switch and that’s not going to happen unless it’s on OP’s main rig.

My advice would be leave the windows installation alone and add a new drive (SSDs are pretty cheap these days) and install Linux on that. Use the BIOS to set the default drive to the new Linux drive and install and use Linux. You’ll have your windows install exactly how it is when you want to go back and just pick that as the boot device from the boot menu. Making Linux the default boot drive also helps with habit forming.

I’m partial to Pop!_OS and their desktop environment.

VirtualBox is free and open source, the windows guest additions piece is not. However, they’re both available for free download from the same site and they do not make any distinction between those two (at least at the time, haven’t looked). They were waiting for companies to download the guest additions piece and going after them to shake down licensing fees. While I don’t recall/know exactly, it seemed like they were almost exclusively going after companies they already had commercial relationships with to add more licensing fees to existing contracts. So yes, from my perspective they were shaking down customers after trying to entrap them with ambiguous free downloads. They had the legal right to do so, but it felt in bad faith.

Is plasma more lightweight than gnome?

Oh wow, I had blocked out the virtual box guest additions debacle/shake-down from my memory. It almost felt like entrapment, the way they went about it.

The file browser looks like windows. But the top bar is very Mac like, maybe if you put a start menu it would help. But to get a windows feel, you’ll need the start menu, application window bars, and the status info all at the bottom (default windows).

Cinnamon is a much more Windows look and feel DE.

Excellent guide, thanks for the write up!

One thing I’d like to point out is that you can pipe output from an application into grep and then be able to use all the information above.

For instance if I want to know the full name of my wireguard interface I can just pass (pipe) the output of ifconfig into grep:

ifconfig | grep wire

The issue is that most of the content posted is archived fairly quickly. Deleting/rewriting only hurts the humans that might have gone looking for it. The way I look at it is, if the data is searchable/indexable by search engines (as a proxy for all other tools) at any point of its life cycle then it’s essentially permanent.