mina86

If everything else fails, there’s always an option of defining your own keymap and enabling it in initrc.

Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.

If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.

PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.

src/* will skip hidden files. You want rsync -avAXUNH src/ dst which copies contents of src into dst. Notice the trailing slash in src/. Without the slash, src is copied into dst so you end up with a src directory in dst. The AXUNH enables preserving more things. You might also add --delete if you’re updating the copy.

PS. I should also mention how I end up with -avAXUNH. Simple:

$ man rsync |grep ' -. *preserve'
       --hard-links, -H         preserve hard links
       --perms, -p              preserve permissions
       --executability, -E      preserve executability
       --acls, -A               preserve ACLs (implies --perms)
       --xattrs, -X             preserve extended attributes
       --owner, -o              preserve owner (super-user only)
       --group, -g              preserve group
       --times, -t              preserve modification times
       --atimes, -U             preserve access (use) times
       --crtimes, -N            preserve create times (newness)

and then include all that. a covers some of those options and those don’t have to be set explicitly:

$ man rsync |grep ' -a ' |head -n1
       --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)

What others wrote except don’t use dd. Use rsync or make a backup with tar. dd will waste time reading unallocated regions of the disk.

Yes. So is Ctrl+J actually. Ctrl+J corresponds to line feed (LF) and Ctrl+M corresponds to carriage return (CR) ASCII characters. They are typically treated the same way.

Yes, I agree. But the dispute is what ‘sends EOF’ actually means. The article I respond to claims Ctrl+D doesn’t send EOF but is like Enter except that new line character is not sent. This is, in some sense true, but as I explain also misleading.

I used Claws Mail at some point in the past. Now notmuch+Emacs.

If you go with adding a passphrase to the drive keep in mind that if it’s a unique one you may end up forgetting it since you won’t normally be using it. Even if you set it to the same passphrase as root partition, if you ever change passphrase for root you might forget to change home passphrase.

I would probably just make a physical copy of the key file. It’s just 32 bytes (no, larger key file doesn’t make things any more secure) so you can hexdump -C it and copy the key on a piece of paper.

Mint is fine. Rather than changing distros, rather keep using it and configuring it the way you want it. For the most part, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux and many popular distributions are largely the same.