Highly skilled people want to become farmers but can’t afford it.
Capitalism has come full circle.

One of my best friends in elementary school was a son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents didn’t speak any German, so naturally he had serious issues with the language, too.
This held him back in school, which lead to him getting sent to the lowest tier of secondary school.
(We have 3 tiers in Germany. The highest one (Gymnasium) qualifies you for university, the middle one (Realschule) used to qualify you for highly-skilled work that doesn’t require university, and the lowest one (Hauptschule) for the trades. Nowadays, even trades jobs scoff at the middle tier, and the lowest tier is basically a direct route to a life of shit jobs or unemployment.)
But just by hanging out with him as a friend, I taught him German, how to use and fix computers, showed him the world of books, and connected him to German society better. I’m not trying to brag, he was a very bright kid and it wasn’t like I was doing this as welfare, he was just a good friend and we shared what we liked with each other.

25 years later we met again by accident. He actually recognized me when he saw me on the street in a different city.
By then he had switched from Hauptschule to Realschule, went on to get his qualification for university, studied economics, created his own company in the IT sector, and had 6 employees. And he told me that my friendship was what kept him out of the wrong circles. On the old computer I had given him (which my parents had replaced) he had taught himself how to use office programs, so he was the only one in the family who could do the taxes, which taught him about finances.
At the time I met him again I was actually unemployed and working odd manual labor jobs under the table, after failing my university education twice due to depression.
He connected me to some contacts he had, which landed me an IT support job, and now I have a pretty good career as a sysadmin.

IMO It’s mostly about the mindset.
If you realize that you can basically do anything on any general purpose distro because they’re all just distributions of the available Linux-compatible software, you’re not a noob anymore.
The effort to achieve what you want can be higher on some and zero on others (if that thing already happens to be pre-installed and configured to your liking).
But if you’ve decided on a distro you like, you always have ways of accessing the software that’s missing out of the box.

I’d say, you’re not a noob anymore if you know basic command line best practices (like not copy/pasting commands with “sudo” in front off the internet unless you know what they do), can parse a man page, and know how to find and install software that’s missing in your distro’s repos.
That being said, it’s perfectly possible to run Linux without using the command line at all, nowadays.

Right off the bat, the url tells me that whatever you linked lumps in cats and dogs.
Cats absolutely, positively can’t be fed a vegan diet, they’re true carnivores.
Dogs are omnivores, though. They can and often do eat vegetables willingly.

German take: Parking on the side of the road and on sidewalks should just be banned.
Its legality is based on a single court case from the 1950’s where a judge decided that it should be a legal use of public space, because it’s necessary and useful for motorizing the country. The justfication is obsolete. It’s not enshrined in any laws. The traffic law specifically forbids it, with exceptions.
Yet it’s practiced everywhere and even where parked cars block sidewalks, police simply don’t enforce the law.

“But where should I park?”
You should have thought of that before buying a car.

“But what about rural areas where you need a car to live?”
No problem here, just park it on your turnip field.

There isn’t an ISO for Linux Mint with Xfce.
What I would try:

• Boot the normal ISO
• open a terminal instead of starting the installation
• enter sudo live-installer-expert-mode

It should boot the Debian expert installer, which lets you choose what DE you want to install. I haven’t tested this on LMDE, though.

Otherwise, install LMDE normally. Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

Let’s call this one Planet Twitter, just to annoy Elon.

A commonly used definition of a non-native species in ecology is if it was introduced by human activity after the year 1492. Because the “discovery” of the Americas by the larger European society kicked off an age where humans started to travel to other continents much more than before, bringing animals and plants with them.

Invasive species are non-native species that out-compete and displace native species.

BAH GOD IT’S PLUTO WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
HE’S CLEARING HIS ORBIT!

Don’t use FreeBSD on a notebook.
Unless you can live without energy management, suspend, bluetooth, function keys and usable wifi speeds out of the box.

Is there any reason not to use Debian when you’re already happy with it on your main rig?

You’re talking about declarative systems like Nix. Immutable just means that the root filesystem is read-only. You can install programs as Flatpaks or inside a container (toolbox on Silverblue).

Generally I use my computer to launch programs that do the stuff I want to do, or edit my files.
My files are in /home and programs for the tasks I need are available as flatpaks.
So I don’t need to rummage around in the rest of the file system. You could call it “a laptop for grandma” except I’m not that old. I use my laptop for office stuff, gaming, photo editing, streaming music and video, browsing, mail, messaging, ssh’ing into my servers, etc. What I don’t use it for anymore is tinkering with my OS. I’m fine with default Gnome and I don’t need to adjust every little thing, I can just adjust myself a bit to how the GUI works.
I just don’t want to read Arch news before I update weekly, set apt-pinning priorities to disable snap, deal with recommended dependencies, meta packages, mirrorlists, third-party repo urls, gpg keyfiles, file permissions, executable flags, systemd services, and all that jazz anymore.

the version change is right there in the screenshot.

That is one of the designs I have ever seen.

Switched to an immutable system after I finally managed to wrap my head around the concept.
I’ve tried it before but left frustrated cause my normal workflow doesn’t apply anymore.
But if you’re looking for an OS that basically disappears in the background, it’s great. I even removed the terminal cause I have no use for it on my laptop.

I actually do. I participated in a 1-day 250km group ride in the Netherlands recently. But I did it on easy mode with a road bike, there were people riding a traditional baker’s bike (including the box) while wearing wooden clogs.

Yes but only from Gnome directly with an app called extensions manager. You can’t install them from the Fedora repo.

I can basically ride a bicycle forever as long as I eat and drink enough, until the lack of sleep overwhelmes me.

People keep commenting on how extremely fit I must be.
But honestly, if you find the right pace it’s like a brisk walk, and if your bike and your clothes fit, it’s more comfortable than that.

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In easy terms, it’s a bit like running a phone OS. The further you deviate from the default, the more issues you’ll have.
It’s the opposite end of the spectrum to Arch.