Practically, this results in a lower footprint when installing it on KDE or other Qt6 based systems, as it will no longer pull the GTK libraries.

Considering their instance, I’d assume they’re more out of their mind than huffing Elmo.

Another important part in this argumentation is that each type of telescope has its use case:
Extraterrestrial telescopes, as they are not objected by atmospheric blur can obtain much better ‘images’ from the cosmos even of weak, low brightness signals, which makes them best for observing the ‘far’ cosmos until the boundaries of recognition.
Yet, they are and always will be much more expensive and more difficult to maintain than terrestrial telescopes. Thus, using them for observing our cosmic front yard, the milky way, is like shooting with canons at sparrows.
Due to their cost, extraterrestrial telescopes also will always be ‘few’, too few to effectively keep track of the objects around us. Thus, ‘cheap’ terrestrial telescopes, large professional ones and small ones run by amateurs, will always be needed to observe the objects ‘closely’ around us, i.e. in our galaxis.

Don’t forget important discoveries are also made by or with the help of amateurs, who permanently observe the night sky and measure the coordinates, i.e. the relative positions, of luminating objects. This allows others, mostly professionals, to calculate their motions and obtain information about the (hidden) masses, i.e. luminating and non luminating objects, inducing and influencing them. By this means, black holes, ‘dark’ masses, or asteroids, ‘fast’ moving illuminated objects, have been and are beeing discovered.

The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is rapidly increasing, with some 100,000 expected to be in place by 2030. And as their numbers grow, so does the difficulty of observing the universe from Earth.

Starlink’s satellites are bright enough that astronomers have decried them as an existential threat for as long as SpaceX has been launching them into orbit. While the company has taken some measures to mitigate how shiny they appear from Earth, their increased number and the many other satellites being launched means that their light pollution is “threatening the entirety of ground-based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways,” astronomers told the BBC. There is a fear that soon, space observation might begin to look like a “windshield of bugs,” and become unfeasible, a researcher at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile told The New York Times.

So basically, at least during the rest of this decade, our billion dollar telescopes, radio and optical, are blind on different frequencies or are only able to obtain diffuse resolution.

It was not special from the outside, but from the inside. It was either the envelope or the TAN list that was printed with a special pattern to prevent reading the list by using a flashlight.

As a German, when living in Sweden, I was (and still am) very impressed, how widespread the use of (Mobile) Bank ID, beside the use of the personal ID number (As a male German, the state has assigned me at least three different ones without requiring any interaction.) for basically everything, is.

In Germany, before introducing a second electronic way of authentication for online (or phone) banking, it was done by a chosen password and a TAN (transaction number) from a list that you regularly got sent by mail in a special envelope. Later it was replaced by that “thingy”, a mobile TAN generator, or push TAN via SMS.

Yay!

It says one special character, not at least one. Maybe the password has more than one.

At least it should not, in many countries must not, be the only measure.
I once encountered an OR in the requirements: Capital letters, small letters and digits OR special characters.

+1

KIO GDrive is the KDE equivalent https://feddit.org/comment/1494000

The KIO GDrive module allows access to Google Drive from KDE apps like Dolphin.

Anything GTK GUI related is not necessary anymore once you have installed KDE, as you then typically use e.g. Discover for software managing instead of the mint software center.
I assume they stopped having a KDE version, as they then would have to completely rewrite their apps (those for the Mint look and feel) in Qt and supporting two such elementary different versions is to much for one team. Now, as they are delivering a Mate, Cinnamon and XFCE flavour, they can take advantage of them being all GTK2 or GTK3 based.

Right, installing a DE is usually not something a direct bloody beginner would/should do. But a beginner who installed Mint, e.g. because of recommendations, has already installed some programs and worked with their system for a while, but now is not confident with Cinnamon DE. For someone like them it’s feasible to ‘simply’ install a different DE e.g. KDE onto their system. (I’d also suggest uninstalling anything GTK related and reinstalling only those packages that one deems useful). As there are no essential differences between Kubuntu and Mint, I don’t see the problems here. KDE is in the same sources.list that Mint uses (in the official Ubuntu repos), so there shouldn’t be any strange dependency conflicts. Thus it’s not going to end up as a Frankenstein system.
Personally, I use Debian btw. 😉, I’d also suggest installing the original, i.e. Debian or LMDE, if one likes the Mint stuff, and get rid of the Ubuntu dependencies. But I consider that basically as a matter of personal taste.

AfaIk, Linux Mint delivers it’s own version of apt, specifically some scripts interacting with apt, which does not default to Snap packages for e.g. Firefox, Kubuntu doesn’t (can’t). Basically, you could also install Kubuntu 24.04 and transform it to Mint 22 with KDE e.g. to have Mint-like behaviour of apt.
Mint has the reputation of being a beginner friendly distribution, Debian doesn’t (not isn’t).
If one uses Mint and does want to use another DE without reinstalling the OS, after all why not?

Do you mean: You currently have a separate partition mounted as /home and want to reuse this when installing a new distro?
Yes, there is a way to avoid creating a new one:

1. In the gui or tui installer, choose manual partitioning
2. If they don’t exist yet, create the partitions you want to use.
3. Specify their file system (ext4 or whatever you prefer), mount point or use, e.g. /, /home, swap.

!!! Be careful !!!

!!! For the /home partition make sure to uncheck recreate file system, format or alike. !!!
This is the partition currently filled with your data!

4. apply changes and procede installation.

TY, when scrolling through the site, I didn’t find a single time mentioning it Ubuntu, but Debian compatibility. However the beta release notification is enlightening:

The system consists of a hybrid base of Debian packages and Vib modules. The major change in Orchid is the switch from Ubuntu to Debian, providing more flexibility and control over the system and update distribution.

A fork of Debian, but yes.

https://vanillaos.org/nerd-info

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12743061

During usual updates? Or during the major release jump of KDE Plasma from 5.x to 6.x?