mina86

First step is to shrink and possibly move around your existing partitions to make space for a new one. GParted Live may help with that. Once you have enough space, just install Arch there. If you already have separate /home you should be able to reuse it.

tldr: For Linux adoption it would be better for devs to focus on 2 (“main”) distros which are very similar to Windows and macOS and then 2-3 further (“big”) distros which give a bit more room to experiment. All the other distros create confusion and analysis-paralysis for the user who wants to switch or wants to help others to do the switch.

This is a mythical man-month fallacy. If everyone who works on distributions focuses on just a handful of them, that does not mean development will go any faster or lead to better outcomes.

Also observe that majority of work which ends up in GNU/Linux systems is outside of distributions. And this work often ends up quite focused.

The problem isn’t diversity of distributions. The problems are people who go on describing history of GNU/Linux when a newbie asks them what distribution to start with; and ‘top 10 Linux distributions’ articles which litter the Internet. Just the other day someone shared a link to Distrochooser, a website which gives newbies ten distributions to pick from.

When a newbie asks about Linux, point them at Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition and that’s it. Or at most ask if their primary use-case is playing games in which case recommend Bazzite. That solves the ‘problem’ of distribution proliferation.

See also New to Linux? Stick To These Rules When Picking Distro.

Why am I using the tool if I then have to read through several reviews anyway?

Also, a lot of smaller distributions are derived from a few larger ones. Therefore, they are usually not very different.

Yes, that’s the point. That’s why if a newbie asks, recommend one of the big ones.

In the end, it is more important to try, after gathering a reasonsble amount of information!

People who know nothing about Linux need a clear choice. If you’re giving them dozen suggestions, than the tool didn’t help them in any way.

Also, a lot of smaller distributions are derived from a few larger ones. Therefore, they are usually not very different.

There are a lot of choices

There are too many choices. I’ve tried the chooser and at the end it gave me 9 distributions to choose from (i.e. nine distributions with no marked negatives). I’ve tried again and it gave me 13 distributions to choose from. This is absolutely useless for someone who knows nothing about Linux.

If someone selects ‘I have little or no knowledge about Linux’ it should go straight to recommending Linux Mint or with no other questions. Or maybe Bazzite if they selected gaming as main use case.

And if I select Windows experience, why doesn’t it mark Ubuntu with a negative as it has more of a MacOS feel?

The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.

I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.

What do you mean? They are included in the updates to -testing.

And 99.135% of scientific papers were checked by a spell checker. This is such a non-issue. Overleaf has AI built in to help with wording; a reviewer recommended I run my paper through AI to improve it. AI is tool like any other and there’s nothing wrong with using it.

VeraCrypt Volume Format Specification:

Each VeraCrypt volume contains an embedded backup header, located at the end of the volume (see above). The header backup is not a copy of the volume header because it is encrypted with a different header key derived using a different salt (see the section Header Key Derivation, Salt, and Iteration Count).

It may be possible to recover the encryption key. You might try asking on VeraCrypt forums/mailing lists or contacting a commercial data recovery service which understands VeraCrypt. Though I’m not familiar with VeraCrypt so I may be misunderstanding the cited documentation.

This doesn’t mean it’s a bad format or that it shouldn’t be used. In fact, it should still be the default unless you need something it doesn’t support or really need to reduce file size.

I rather disagree. I’ve switched to lossless WebP for all my needs. There are practically no drawbacks and I get a smaller file.

For doing stuff in a directory, I use a replacement for cd command.

For aliases:

alias +='git add'
alias +p='git add -p'
alias +u='git add -u'
alias -- -='cd -'
alias @='for i in'
alias c='cargo'
alias date='LANG=C date'
alias diff='cdiff'
alias gg='git grep -n'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
alias ll='ls -o'
alias ls='ls -vFT0 --si --color=auto --time-style=long-iso'
alias rmd='rmdir'

I also have various small scripts and functions:

• a for package management (think apt but has simplified arguments which makes it faster to use in usual cases),
• e for opening file in Emacs,
• g for git,
• s for sudo.

And here’s ,:

$ cat ~/.local/bin/,
#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	paste -sd,
else
	printf '%s\n' "$@" | paste -sd,
fi