Yep… Mint is always following the current LTE version of Ubuntu, usually behind them by a couple months, which is going to be a few months to a year behind on most packages at the time of release, and will be another two years before getting a new feature update

Anything not system level (such as the DE), if you want the latest, Flatpak. Anything else, your options are to wait a few years, try to shoehorn it in yourself and deal with the dependency hell, or hop to a distro that uses the version you want.

Even the latest version of Mint that just released about a month ago doesn’t have KDE 6 yet, and it’ll probably be two years before it’s available. Which is why I’m thinking of switching to Fedora for a while.

It ain’t done til GRUB don’t run?

I don’t know if they still do this but the old chassis would actually survive a drink bring spilled on it because it siphons it around and through the motherboard and out holes in the bottom. They also outperformed pretty much everything else on the market that wasn’t specifically a rugged laptop for durability.

The classic keyboard was legendary, I never understood why they ditched it. Nobody hates the new keyboard, but nobody sings its praises like they did the old one either. And they’ve had a decade to fix this by bringing it back.

I’ve heard this but don’t really understand it… At a high level, what makes cuda so much better?

While that’s literally what it is, that’s not really how it’s represented and requires also understanding binary numbers.

Even knowing that, I’ve always found it easiest to get to the permissions the way I described, which when you think about it is actually the same as what you’d do to translate binary into decimal/octal if you don’t have them memorized: look at the values of each position that’s set to 1 and add them together. So, 101 in binary would be 4+0+1, or 5, which is the same as saying read is 4 and execute is 1 and add them together, the latter of which I think is easier to learn (and is how I’ve always seen it taught, though clearly YMMV)

Both get you to the same place though

Quick and dirty: the basic permissions are read, write, and execute, and are applied to the owner, the group, and everyone else. They’re applied to all files and directories individually.

It’s represented by a 3 digit number (in octal, which is base 8, so 0 to 7). The first number is the permission given to the file’s owner, the second to the file’s group owner, and the third to everyone else. So, the owner of the file is the one user account that owns it, the group applies to all members of that group. User and group ownership are also applied to each file and directory individually.

Read, write, and execute are represented by the numbers 4, 2, and 1, respectively, and you add them together to get the permission, so 0 would be nothing, 1 would be execute but not read or write, 2 would be write but not read or execute (and yes there are uses for that), 3 would be write and execute but not read, 4 is read only, etc through to 7 which is basically full control.

This will take a little bit to make sense for most people.

chmod (change modifier, I think) is the program you use to set permissions, which you can do explicitly by the number (there are other modes but learn the numbers first), so chmod 777 basically means everyone has full control of the file or directory. Which is bad to do with everything for what I hope are obvious reasons.

chown (change owner) is the program you use to set the owner (and optionally the group) of a file or directory, and chgrp (change group) changes the group only.

It gets deeper with things like setuid bits and sticky bits, and when you get to SELinux it really gets granular and complex, but if you understand the octal 3 digit permissions, you’ll have the basics that will be enough for quite a lot of use cases.

(Additionally to the 3 digit number, permissions can be represented a bit friendlier where it just lists letters and dashes, so 750 (full control user, read and execute group) could be shown as rwxr-x—, where r=read, w=write, and x=execute, and what they’re applied to can be represented by the letters u for user (aka owner), g for group, and o for other)

This goes into more detail of those basics: https://opensource.com/article/19/6/understanding-linux-permissions

It might, if it worked well, but that’s a big “if” and as I suggested in my original post I don’t think it’s particularly likely they’ll do it either way

There’d be no reason to. Anymore, I think they’d be more likely than that to try to port their Xbox game store to Linux than try to kill Linux gaming (though I doubt they’ll do that either)

Everyone has a test environment

Some are lucky enough to also have a separate production environment

Probably 6.06, the first LTS release and the only one to date that was delayed from the usual April/October release timeframe

I remember being pretty excited for it

That’s a joke almost as old as that release

Is dependable not a good enough reason to be someone’s favorite?

Maybe they should go with OpenGecko or OpenChameleon

It’s a play on “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince”

Yes, this is actually where I was going with it

New name suggestion:

“The Distro Formerly Known As openSUSE”

This is why Ubuntu was such a big deal when it came out, it was one of the few where things more or less “just worked” without having to chase proprietary or reverse engineered drivers down

Honestly, that’s what I thought too, and wanted to check that out

This is probably a dumb question, but what program is that?