phanto

Flatpaks: NOT Ubuntu's containerized deliverable. They use snaps. Flatpaks are more Fedora's thing. I know Mint uses flatpaks, and Silver blue relies heavily on them. Snaps v Flatpaks are like Coke v Pepsi. It's all just sugar water, but people care, for reasons.

Tailscale: a VPN -esque service that lets you connect networks together in fun and interesting ways. For instance: I can use tailscale to access my home network from my phone!

I test drove a Smart Car once, and was telling the sales guy that I didn't feel safe, and he was all like, "Oh no, these things sit high and catch the eye..." Just as a truck did it's level best to kill us both. I got a Honda instead. Been driving it since 2010.

My wife: "Tell the internet they're not funny!"

So that was your wife I met while watching you drive my wife around the block on your scooter?

Yup! Mint is, like, 90% Ubuntu, so almost every instruction that works on Ubuntu works on Mint. The only thing that's different is that Mint "likes" flatpaks over snaps. These are two different ways to install apps, but honestly, you may never need to use either, and you can use either, both, or neither and not worry about it. Linux has a lot of "I like A over B for X reason.", cue whining and moaning. You can mostly ignore it, or you can troll us Linux types over their particular A by saying "But I heard B was better..." None of it really matters. Gnome/KDE, apt/dnf, flatpaks/snaps, it's all just a couple different ways of accomplishing the same thing, which is getting it done without paying some megacorp way too much money and giving up your data.

I met my wife by driving her around the block on my scooter...

I love my scooter. It burns 3L/100km. It makes hella less noise than any sports car I can name. If I were to hit a pedestrian going 50kmph on it vs an F150? As far as the asshole comment... Well, shrug I like me!

I use ProtonVPN on Mint, and I did have to type a command into the console to install it the first time, but I just click on the Icon in the start menu to launch it now. All the Major distros have an update feature that can be run from the desktop. My version of Mint (Cinnamon) has a little update notification icon on the bottom right just like Windows does. It's pretty easy. I like Mint, but I have distro hopped for years, and I am mostly settled on Fedora, but I still have a Mint installer on a USB for rescue missions. Its Live Linux is great. Making the computer totally dead would require a lot of effort, since you can always boot into a live Linux USB and have a usable system. Heck, I have booted my Mind stick on a system with no Hard Drive and used the machine anyway. Linux is actually easier in that respect than Windows, since you never have to Putz around with licenses. My only caution would be to make sure you have access to another computer somewhere, in case you need to write a new USB installer. That's about all for caution.

You can make the system stop booting for a bit if you screw up the install, but if you keep a Windows installer USb and whatever Linux USB installer handy, you can always get the system booting again. If you know someone who has done it before, dual-booting is a good way to dip your toe in. I keep a small windows install on most of my systems, just in case I have that one app or whatever I need to run, but I almost never boot into Windows anymore.

That the bazaar is better than the cathedral, every time.

This is a bit out there, but for the "feel", I'd recommend Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It takes a bit to get going, but wow it's a great book. The rest of the series is satisfying as well, but you don't have to go past book one.

Thank you, that was very nice! But I do love my car, too.