Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

By all means, they need replaced. But they’re nowhere near the contributor that leaded gasoline was. That stuff probably fucked up 6 distinct generations. If you lived in a city, you were inhaling lead constantly.

Given that this is a laptop we’re talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like “guy with money”. It’s not so much that someone’s gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it’s just a question of “how bad is the crime actually on this commute?”. Most places it’d be fine but some rough parts of some cities I’d be worried.

The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren’t gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

It’s fine. For legal reasons (particularly in the EU and California) they had to add a Terms of Use fit the browser, and the had to translate a bunch of broad, idealist, simple phrases into legalese so they wouldn’t get killed by those governments.

Joke’s on me, I still have to use windows at work!

Even then, there’s a warning that the upgrade process can take several hours. Even if it’s largely hands off, that’s not exactly my image of an easy upgrade.

Specifically upgrading major versions. See the official documentation for upgrading Debian 11 to 12. It’s far more involved than minor version upgrades.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html

Here’s the official documentation for upgrading from Debian 11 to 12. The TL;DR is that it takes 8 chapters to describe the process.

https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html

The problem is when it comes time for a major version upgrade. Debian 12.10.0 to 12.11.0 probably won’t be a big deal. But upgrading from Debian 11 to 12 was a pain. Debian 12 to 13 will probably be a pain as well.

The thing with Debian is that yes, it’s the most stable distro family, but stable != “just works”, especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it’s one of the more painful distros to do so.

I think fedora is a good compromise there. It’s unstable compared to RHEL, but it’s generally well-vetted and won’t cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.

Depends on the exact Nvidia card you’re using. The newer parts all have good drivers, but as you get older things get more fiddly.

But most of the improvement is in Steam’s compatibility mode. Proton allows you to run so many games with one click that use to be a whole project to configure.

Steam OS is based on arch, and outside of the Steam Deck it’s really not that great of a distro. It’s just tailor-made for that hardware and has good brand recognition.

Bazzite is a similar concept but operates better as an actual OS outside of being a gaming console.

You can sue for anything in the USA. But it is pretty much impossible to successfully sue for “ripping off someone’s style”. Where do you even begin to define a writing style?

I once broke the table of contents for a manual I was writing in MS Word. Spent like 2 days untangling that mess.

The thing with Debian distros (like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS) is that they’re extremely stable releases. This does not necessarily mean everything “just works”, but rather that they will not experience major code changes that could disrupt a working system. This means that if some apps don’t work out of the box, that state is going to be pretty much the same in any distro based on the same Debian version.

A more “agile” distro might be less stable, but as a result could see some updates to apps that Debian is still lagging behind on. Fedora is probably the “next step” in this direction: it’s still reliable but gets updates more frequently than Debian (it’s sort of a “proving ground” for code before it gets pulled into Red Hat, which is a distro focused on long-term stability).

As for desktop environments: I’ve always thought GNOME was the most Mac-like DE, but KDE has enough configuration options that you can kind of turn it into anything you want. Since this is on a very old laptop, you might consider LXDE, which isn’t the prettiest DE, but it’s super lightweight and might let you squeeze out a bit more performance if you’re wasting a lot of compute power just rendering the desktop.

Man, this infographic is like, EXACTLY why people are scared of Linux, lol.

It has a lot of good info but it’s just so overloaded. Can’t decide what story it wants to tell so it tells like 7 of them.

This is my experience playing with FreeBSD.

“These ports are cool, I can compile all the software from source so I know exactly what I’m getting!”

[This software has 100 dependencies]

“Well I’m not reading all that, I’ll just click Yes for all”

Alright, let’s run a quick pacman -Syu to get everything squared up before I start this time- critical task.

…oh fuck

4. Yes, portainer will see every container you make, regardless of how it was created.

5. No, creating a docker container doesn’t make a compose file. It’s like cooking a meal doesn’t output a recipe.

6. You can save the compose file(s) wherever you want, you just need to run “docker compose up” from that directory. If you make the container within portainer, I believe it stores the compose files in its own volume. Not sure about that, I keep my compose file separate from portainer for most services.