Paul Evans39 said:I didn't bother downloading anything back when I was just surfing the web as a teenager, though it’s nice that I've finally gotten around to it now that my daily routine involves checking the news and looking at the weather forecast. ��
McAfee, huh? I wonder if it'll get into a scrap with a lightweight tool like Malwarebytes.
McAfee has quite a reputation for clashing with other antivirus tools and various other software; plus, its bloatware levels are pretty much on par with Norton Antivirus, which, frankly, I can only describe as 🤮. Personally, I’d rather just go with free Avast paired with free Malwarebytes and a ZoneAlarm firewall—that combination won't hog your system resources and gives you solid protection for zero dollars.
You don't actually need to install the tray quite like the guy in the video shows; I usually just attach it directly to the cable or adapter, which works fine for me.
I went ahead and nuked my swap partition on openSUSE, though I’m not entirely sure if that was the right move. Regardless, I’ve decided to run a Secure Erase on my SSD to boost performance before installing a different OS—specifically Fedora Security Lab (reasoning being the niche purpose of the OS and how it stacks up against "Fedora/openSUSE" here). What I really want to know is: can I use the hdparm utility within the Fedora Security Lab Live environment to perform the Secure Erase, just so I can get Fedora installed on the SSD afterward? Also, is switching to Fedora actually a smart play? P.S. I tried the Fedora Live environment earlier and couldn't get the WLAN to connect—not through the GUI, nor via the CLI.
It feels like you might be overthinking things a little. If this is just a single-user machine, a Secure Erase is probably overkill, much like using Red Hat Security Lab; you aren't actually going to "fix" anything regarding performance. Honestly, the only maintenance an SSD really needs is running a periodic RETRIM, and that should be about it. It's usually best to just stick to the manufacturer's own toolkit or the built-in options provided by the OS and call it a day—anything else is just extra work. Personally, I run Fedora 33 Cinnamon and SUSE Tumbleweed, and both have been perfectly fine for me.
If you're looking to set up a backup, I'd suggest grabbing a SATA3 USB 3.x external hard drive with at least 2 TB of space. Though, if your data needs aren't particularly demanding, 1 TB will probably do just fine enough.
Since TrueCrypt is basically a ghost at this point, it’s causing some headaches on Windows 10. If you're looking for a way forward, BitLocker works fine for Windows 10, while you might want to look into VeraCrypt or BitLocker for Linux.
I remember loving the book when I was a kid, though the movie was just okay—nothing to write home about. I caught the animated series back in the late '80s and actually thought that was pretty solid. There’s even an adult version out there (you can find it on Pornhub 😁) where Dorothy masturbates and sleeps with the witch. 🙂 Personally, I think this version beats the original: 😬 https://imgs1cdn.adultempire.com/pro...2/1648882h.jpg
Jack Cook7 said:I never said you needed to be a developer to install VMware, I just meant nobody *except* developers actually has a reason to use it.
Like, 99.9% of users don't even know what a VM is. And out of that tiny 0.1% who do, 99% of them have zero clue how virtualization actually works.
If we're agreeing on those numbers, then I don't see why we're even arguing about how easy the installation is.
That isn't quite right. I find a VM comes in handy for testing out a new OS or running legacy systems, plus it's great for getting old applications or outdated hardware working when the drivers just won't play nice with Windows 10 anymore. I use VMs for all those things, and I'm certainly no developer.
You can find those options in pretty much any decent image editor once you move past the basic ones; you don't actually need Photoshop for this since Gimp and several other free tools handle it just fine. I'd suggest selecting bicubic interpolation when resizing, and if you're saving as a JPG, try to keep the quality at 80% or higher, though using a lossless format like a TIFF with LZW compression is probably a safer bet.
Xubuntu is probably my top pick Lubuntu is definitely the lightest on resources, though I find the LXQt interface a bit too stripped down for my taste Ubuntu is decent enough, but I just never really vibed with GNOME Kubuntu feels a little too buggy and bloated for what it is
Elizabeth Patel4 said:Thanks for the tip! MX looks solid on paper, but unfortunately, it won't recognize the wireless card in my HP laptop, so I'm stuck without Wi-Fi. I tried Googling a fix, but nothing simple popped up—there are tons of threads about this on their forums, but I haven't been able to nail down a solution yet. As for PCLinuxOS, I haven't really warmed up to it yet, though I plan to tinker with it a bit more.
Does anyone else have any other suggestions?
That Wi-Fi card probably just needs some proprietary firmware installed—it’s pretty common with Broadcom chips—but it's usually a quick fix. I also completely forgot to mention that MX Linux handles all of this much more smoothly. AHS If you're looking for better driver support, you should really look into the AHS version. The standard release can be a bit finicky and might be exactly why you're running into that specific headache. If you haven't given the AHS version a shot yet, it’s definitely worth a go. Otherwise, your best bets are probably sticking with Fedora or Ubuntu and its various derivatives.
Mint is just a clean, little system built for end users.
If you're looking to spin up virtual machines, then you aren't an end user—you're a developer, and honestly, that's a whole different breed of user entirely.
It’s kind of wild how none of those Linux experts bothered to point that out to you. I guess they've never actually dealt with regular end users before.
Maybe that's why they don't have any.
Virtual machines aren't some terrifying monster, nor do you need to be a seasoned developer to get them up and running. While they might not exactly be "entry-level" territory, they're certainly nowhere near requiring professional dev skills. If you're just starting out, setting up a VMware machine on Windows is actually pretty straightforward.
It’s likely just some poorly implemented systemd services or background processes hogging all your CPU and RAM. You could probably track it down using a system monitor. I haven't used Ubuntu in quite a while; the last bits of this junk I messed with were just DVD live versions, and even those felt sluggish. Honestly, more than the bloat—which wasn't nearly as bad back then as it is now—it was the way they'd just ignore bugs from older releases only to have them pop up again in newer ones. It really rubbed me the wrong way because it's obvious from miles away that the OS isn't the high-quality tool it was back in 2009 when I actually enjoyed using it. Ultimately, all that led to the distro losing its popularity, since the way things are headed now, it doesn't really make much sense anymore.
Jack Jones3 said:driftingcanyon2, any chance you could recommend a distro?
I’ve said this before: if you're just starting out, MX Linux is pretty much the gold standard. You could always go with PCLinuxOS, or maybe one of the Ubuntu flavors, but honestly, all of those options feel like a step up from the lackluster experience you get with Mint.
Jerry Murphy3 said:When I previously mentioned on the Developers USA Relaxed forum that Mint tends to choke over time, I got absolutely torn apart. Apparently, it's impossible for that to happen on Linux because "it's not like Windows," according to the Gjuro Kladarić school of thought. But in reality, it behaves exactly like Windows: after a certain amount of time, it slows down until it becomes unusable. To some people, reinstalling Linux just to fix performance issues is treated like heresy.
However, I have a question: why does this actually happen? Setting aside the debate over whether Mint is good or bad, is there a concrete technical reason behind this slowdown?
It feels like we’re just watching a bunch of mediocre developers peddle recycled ideas, essentially stripping parts from Debian or Ubuntu because they lack anything original to offer. They slap on some half-baked "fixes," only to pass the same old bugs down to the next version, and then there's the nightmare of pushing updates with kernels that haven't been properly vetted—more stuff lifted straight from Debian or Ubuntu—leaving us with nothing but a broken mess of a Linux distro.
To be honest, I wouldn't call openSUSE a beginner-friendly distro at all, mostly because it relies on so many niche tools like zypper and the Control Panel that you won't find anywhere else, and the installation process itself isn't exactly intuitive or straightforward. You have to navigate through the Control Panel to tweak your GRUB2 boot options, and as for swap, you can just set that up during the install—personally, I just manually created a single partition for my root filesystem without any swap at all and called it a day, though you'll probably want to disable the KDE Wallet service within the Control Panel service settings.
Mint was originally pitched as an "improved" version of Ubuntu, though that sentiment really only held water until about 2010; since then, the quality has slipped so significantly that it’s arguably worse than Ubuntu itself. It’s fundamentally flawed because it relies entirely on someone else's foundation—specifically Debian and Ubuntu—meaning it's tethered to those two giants, where bugs aren't actually fixed for years but just get passed from one release to the next. I spent quite a long time using this distro back in the day, so I'm speaking from experience. At best, Mint is mediocre, while the Debian-based Mint is complete junk—unreliable and practically unusable. It's unfortunate that this mess is often "recommended" to beginners. As for swap, the OP keeps bringing it up, seemingly unaware that they don't even need swap with 8 GB of RAM.
Since the laptop is only about eighteen months old, the battery ought to be in pretty decent shape; if you haven't been constantly draining it to zero or letting it bake in high heat, those original cells can easily last up to a decade. A quick calibration might help, though I’d also suggest checking the actual wear level using this tool: https://batterycare.net/en/download.html Here are some instructions on how to handle the calibration: https://batterycare.net/en/guide.html It’s usually a good idea to run a calibration once you've hit about 30 discharge cycles.
Whatever path you take here probably won't end well. A mining rig really needs to stay a mining rig, rather than trying to turn it into some sort of hybrid desktop setup. You’re always going to run into overheating issues when you're mining; it’s just an unavoidable reality of the hardware. You could try modifying the cooling—maybe go with a water loop or cram in some extra fans—but that’s going to be incredibly loud, and I suspect it’s already noisy enough as it is. As for choosing your primary GPU, you can find those settings under the Advanced section in your BIOS.
rapidridge95 said:I don't actually need the email space—what I really need is massive storage for video files. My old hard drives just gave up the ghost on me, taking all my footage with them, so now I’m stuck re-uploading everything to the cloud...
Honestly, you’d be better off just picking up a new external hard drive for backups. Relying on the cloud isn't exactly fast, and it certainly isn't secure. Do you have any idea how long it would take to upload, say, 100 GB using a sluggish connection from Comcast? You’d probably be waiting ten days minimum.