Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.

The only charitable read of this is the end-user bypassing controls on company-supplied computers.

Of course that doesn’t mean that they won’t also shove secure boot, hw lockouts, DRM, etc on regular consumer laptops as well.

Try running a command like vulkaninfo --summary.

Then try running VK_DRIVER_FILES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json vulkaninfo --summary (alternatively, just try running whatever else it is you use that reports you only have lavapipe available). See if there’s a difference and if it finally reports the hardware being used.

I’m not a Mint user but according to this page https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_wilma.php

• Run the Driver Manager
• Choose the NVIDIA drivers and wait for them to be installed
• Reboot the computer

What is the GPU?

Vulkan drivers come as part of Mesa, which would already be part of Linux Mint. Unless you have an Nvidia GPU, or a GPU that’s somehow too modern for Mint 21.3.

I think arch peaked in its popularity in 2016 or so. It felt like an elitism thing was going on around that time that has 1. Faded off and 2. Been dispersed into other distros because as it turns out there are other good choices, too.

Besides. How are you going to become a rising influencer rehashing the same old takes as the prior generation of dorks? Can’t keep people coming with Arch is the greatest YouTube videos forever.

Give me the OLD CHASSIS and the OLD KEYBOARD and make every other component new. I’d be in heaven. I would totally love an absolutely up-to-date x220. And I don’t mean a razor-thin one. I mean a thick one that I can hold in my hand comfortably.

I totally get what you’re saying, but I suspect the OP is not going to be using this device full-time. Or even part-time.

The one caveat to building is if you build a PC and a single component is faulty, you are now responsible for determining which component is to get the RMA done. That can be a big hassle. One time for me it was actually two different components that needed to be replaced by the manufacturers, and that was a pain to figure out.

I want to use global keyboard shortcuts with Wayland that can be defined in the application, not the compositor. This makes using Wayland much more difficult for me.

And I also want to use proper Flatpak file permissions, but for Flatpaks to stop generating fake stupid random file paths so that this common issue stops being an issue:

Come in and set the file path to my games directory in my emulator. It works fine. Come back a few days later and it loses all memory of games, because it is receiving a file path from a portal that no longer exists.

Whenever I encounter a project that is not hosted on GitHub, such as https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot I get totally delighted because navigating and browsing it actually works.

In GitHub if I am browsing the source code I now have to open it in a raw page without highlighting, because GitHub’s features absolutely gunk it up. I have no intention of ever putting a new project on GitHub again. Bad user experience, untrustworthy leadership, and bad values (I.e. Silicon Valley ones)

The answer to your question why is because I arbitrarily decided on that years ago. That’s basically all there is to it.

The answer to your file ownership problems I can’t answer, because I don’t have that happening. My files are mounted like so:

LABEL=BigHD /mnt/BigHD btrfs nosuid,nodev,nofail,noatime,x-gvfs-show,compress-force=zstd:1 0 0

It ultimately doesn’t actually matter because in many cases these things are convention and there is no real system-based effect. So while it would be especially weird if your distro installed packages into those directories, it ultimately doesn’t matter. Someone already linked the filesystem hirearchy. See how tiny the /media and /mnt sections are?

I put my fixed disks into subdirectories under /mnt and I mount my NAS shares (I keep it offline most of the time) in subdirectories in /media.

But what about cases where you wish to mount and share with multiple users?

Love your enthusiasm. Your comment feels like it was just written with the most positive attitude straight from the heart. I wish to carry that energy with me through the rest of my day :)

You may as well just complain about the kernel itself being the vendor lock in to Linux

Nice. The improvements to Nautilus (Files) are welcome, but it’s still the the reason why I’m leaving Gnome for KDE, anyhow. I can’t stand Nautilus.

I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It’s a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn’t really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora’s free software stance, I don’t have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.

When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.

One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I’ve had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.

So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.

On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.

edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.

My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.

Can’t help but think about how Facebook inc rebranded itself to Meta to chase/promote the metaverse fad.