Also, related note, how easy is it to migrate from one distro to another? I am thinking about trying something else - maybe base Fedora or Arch - to hopefully have better performance.

You can backup your data and restore but will have to reinstall all your apps.

Also have you tried asking in the nobara discord? GE and other devs are in there so you likely to get help there.

They should at least make a docs tag or similar and tag all these documentation like posts with it.

Another thing is that my laptop might be using Legacy BIOS, so systemd isn’t compatible with it.

Oh sorry, then Fedora isnt a good idea. They have deprecated support for Legacy BIOS.

Anything with LXQT 2.1 available should give the same experience however right now it seems only rolling distros ship with 2.1. Lubuntu 25.04 will ship (in ~April) with LXQT 2.1 but it wont default to wayland so you might have to do some manual config. Its also not an lts release.

storage requirements

shouldn’t be a big problem. lxqt is super lightweight. If you go with lubuntu, I recommend turning off snap to save some space.

Linux Mint MATE or XFCE are really good if you dont necessarily want wayland support.

Another option is the Raspberry Pi OS. Debian based, should be very lightweight and runs wayland. I haven’t personally tried it though.

Try Fedora LXQT too, it ll default to wayland in the next fedora release (~4th april i think). Its very lightweight.

I think piefeds combined view makes this less of an issue. Like people subscribe to/post in the big communities because they are more active so get more comments and stuff. But in piefed you get the combined discussion from all the communities so you get the same experience even if you are subscribed to a less popular community on that topic.

I dont think its the software* but the instance that matters. Everyone being on lw is not good (not that there is anything wrong with lw, just that centralization is bad). Thankfully most lemmy apps nowadays default to lemm.ee which should hopefully counter most of the centralization. Lemmy apps should rotate the default server when it gets too big which will help a lot (also shows the impact defaults have).

*Software would have mattered if the main devs instance was also the biggest. Or a very popular lemmy client defaulted to their own instance. With lemmy thats not the case.

Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).

Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.

Discourse already exists (and most big companies use that).

Also you can see many other things on Reddit or Discord too (or the internet). Im not sure how that is a point against federation. If companies really want to control everything they can create their own instance (like KDE’s lemmy instance).

They can defederate everyone from their instance to get an “unfederated” instance but again it changes nothing imo.

In fact defederation is a negative since now you have to worry about new signups, moderation, etc. While in a federated instance, you can leave moderation to other instances and only allow team/company members on your instance. Users can sign up on other instances and still be able to interact with your instance for support, help and other stuff.

Enabling this feature will probably require you to agree to Google AI training on your emails.

Woah that MR actually got merged damn. Couldn’t believe it when I saw this, I thought the title was a clickbait or something until I checked and it was for real.

Delta chat is based on top of email (i.e.SMTP, IMAP) so its like sending emails but in a chat format and encryption on top (and some more stuff).

Yeah the whole situation really sucks. Im a big fan of both marcan and linux so its just sad how it all ended. But Im hopeful the R4L project will be successful despite these setbacks. Some of the first rust drivers are really close to landing and I think once that happens, the dust will mostly settle as hopefully most of the things around rust would have been figured out by then. Even this situation led to some improvements like the R4L policy (and also brought the issue to greater public scrutiny). Though the drama probably won’t end there, especially if rust starts making in to the core kernel (thus start being required for building the kernel). That is probably going to be the final obstacle; if rust makes it to the core kernel code, I think the R4L project will have succeeded.

tl;dr Run sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-24.04 in the terminal to get the latest kernel version available (v6.11.x)

Linux Mint uses whatever kernel the latest Ubuntu LTS (24.04) is using which happens to be v6.8.x. Ubuntu LTS and thus Linux Mint will by default remain on this kernel version for two years after its release i.e. until the release of the next major version of Ubuntu LTS. This is for stability (hence the LTS moniker - Long Term Stable). You do get security updates and fixes in point releases of the kernel.

So yes kernel versions are tied to your Linux Mint version. But Ubuntu also offers newer kernel versions, however those will be less stable so are not recommended unless you have some hardware that doesn’t work with your current kernel version. Just run sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-24.04 in the terminal which will install v6.11.x. This will also install newer versions of drivers (mesa) and other related stuff. Note that this kernel version is not fixed, you will get updated to a newer major kernel version every 6 months.

*And if you have an Nvidia GPU, you would also want to install the Nvidia driver for the newer kernel. I think Mint provides an app for that (drivers or something).

really nice video, covers the whole spectrum of things

You are just being silly, there is no way its going to “seriously damage the entire Linux project”. There is nothing too technical about the whole R4L drama (esp. the recent one), its mostly political opposition to Rust from some C folks. We have seen this before in Linux (Wayland/X11, systemd/sysv, etc.).