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This sounds familiar. Can you verify if you've enabled net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf? If you have to make a change, then issue sysctl --system to reload the updates.

That's fine, we're happy to keep the better choice to ourselves. 😆

I hope nobody lets them know that Firefox on Linux has never shown ads for any of their content.

Sure. You install your DE first, and then start installing software like browsers, email, etc. The net install disk is just a barebones system to get you up and running and then you install whatever you need from there. If you're building a desktop them you might want a DE. If you're building a server then you might want web or email services. The basic installation can be expended to include everything you want for that particular machine.

The advantage of using a pre-configured full setup is that you don't need to know the name of all the packages you want to install, and typically you can still remove the ones you don't like. Even with the DE you will probably find that the package also installs a number of common tools like task bar widgets or file managers. So in making a truly custom system you will have to hit google quite a bit to find the things you want to install, but then you learn what all those various packages actually do. Even the GUI login screen has multiple choices to select from which give you different ways of managing the logins. That's one of the things most people really enjoy about linux -- almost every type of software has multiple choices (like Firefox vs Chrome) so it's easy to build up a desktop that suits your particular needs.

1. Have you looked at Mate Desktop? It's based off of an earlier version of Gnome but I find it much more familiar to the way things used to be managed on Windows.

2. That's going to come down to the specific hardware. A lot of vendors build their devices to only work under Windows but there are a lot of smart Linux techs who have been able to reverse-engineer working drives. Your best bet is to find a hardware compatibility list and see how much support your particular laptop has.

3. If you look at Debian, you can get the "net-install" image. This doesn't even install a desktop environment, it simply boots you to a command line and you can install whatever you want to use. Many other distributions probably have a similar installed available, it's just a matter of deciphering what the names mean.

4. If you install something as root, or if it's installed by the system during the initial installation, then yes you'll need root, but more likely you will use "sudo" which gives your user account the temporary access needed (if it was set up with that access). Again, going back to something like Debian's net-install, everything except the core OS would be installed by you anyway.

5. "Rooting" sounds like a term you brought from an Android phone. In desktop terms, think of the root user as being like the admin on Windows. You only use it when needed, like when you're performing a system update, otherwise you do everything under your regular user account.

6. When you install a DE like Gnome, it also adds a login to your graphical interface. If you install a second DE, then on the login screen you are presented a choice as to which one you want to use this time. If you want to switch, you just log out and select another one from the login screen. You can have as many as you want, just remember that this loads a ton of extra stuff on your system. It's ok to play with, but then I would suggest uninstalling the ones you don't like.

7. Wayland is the core of the DE. The previous system was Xorg, but both are still in common use. Docker is a container system, so like if you wanted to install a web server then Docker would contain all of the modules for that software independently of anything else you have installed. This means that a system update is less likely to break something (although that's already pretty unlikely), but it does require more storage space.

I would only point out that most hardware problems are due to vendors refusing support of any OS except Windows. If they didn't support Windows you would see equal problems there. I know there has been a lot of contention with nVidia over the years, not so sure about others.

Also, linux does take direct control of all hardware and runs it hard. If a vendor claims their devices can run under certain conditions then Linux expects it to actually perform that way. Many vendors exaggerate their claims though and it's quickly discovered that their devices cannot actually perform as expected on the general hardware sold to the public. Nobody is surprised, and the linux driver admins eventually make those features optional so you can test the specific device to see if it lives up to the vendor's claims. My nVidia GTX 1050 has been running well for me though.

Otherwise I agree that yeah, a lot of faults come down failing hardware. In my case the same machine that constantly blue-screened under Windows worked fine for many years under Linux, and I'm one of those who really push the hell out of my computers. Coding in Visual Studio while also having a bunch of other windows open for reference on my current project, on a machine that only had a gig of memory? Yeah I expected a lot. And moving forward to today, I have dozens of windows open to browsers, spreadsheets, terminals, image editors, and 3D modeling software. Surprisingly I currently have over a gig of free ram right now (on a machine with 16GB) but I'm usually closer to a half or quarter gig free. My machine is pretty clean right now because it rebooted a month ago from a power outage during a storm, so we'll see how it looks in another couple months.

Don't forget Win3.x. I remember working on that, trying my hand at OS/2 Warp with high hopes. I never used NT, just the home version of Windows 2k, however I was already trying to move away from Microsoft at the time. I was introduced to AT&T Unix in the late 90's with our Audix voicemail system, and learned a lot while attempting to upgrade the hardware to a more current 486 computer. I got hooked but Unix was expensive as hell, then the internet led me to Linux. My first attempts were with a version of Slackware that ran from a folder on the Windows desktop and by '99 I had my first dedicated server up and running. It wasn't until 2006 that I finally dumped my dual-boot desktop and permanently dropped Windows.

I haven't either. 😆 Switching to Linux solved all of those problems allowing me to run for months at a time between reboots. Of course back then things didn't work so smoothly, and I did have some struggle getting my sound card working. These days it pretty much all just works.

Ah man, you toughed it out clear into XP? Win2k was the last version I ever ran here. That whole shit of "oh you inserted a USB drive, please reboot" really got on my nerves. Plus trying to write code and having Windows crash once a week.

You might want to re-read that... This is saying they signed up for a 1-month free trial in 2019. It sounds like they haven't even had a subscription for the last 5 years but the lawyers are still trying to argue that it applies.

Read it again, in context. What they said is perfectly valid.

If it's an automated system, wouldn't it be written to just look at the original post date, and if the comment was changed (say a month or a year) later, then the script restores the original post? I mean you could get fancy and have the script check if a user is changing all of their comments to the same message, but that seems like overkill. On the other hand, I've been running into quite a few posts lately where it's obvious a single person has simply deleted all of their comments, and I don't think those are getting reverted?