VS HDD seems a bit unlikely. The typical cheap optical media isn't designed or meant for long term archival. There are more expensive types that are meant for long term storage but I'm pretty sure that's not what OP is talking about, especially if it's just random blank discs from thrift stores, etc.
But to your point even cheap optical media might outlast SSDs since those tend to lose their saved data if stored unpowered for x years.
To be fair Ubuntu is still okay especially starting out, it's one of the more polished distros with a ton of online documentation when you need to search around and figure out how to do things. And no one says you have to stay with a distro, once you're comfortable with Linux it's easy enough to check out other distros.
That aside a lot of people have been recommending Mint for new users so that's definitely one you can check out if you want to try branching out now rather than later.
PS - Nvidia has a less than stellar reputation for their Linux drivers, you may want to consider reading up on that for whichever distro you choose. I have an Nvidia GPU (old non-Quadro class) running on Debian, works fine now but I did have a few false starts getting it going properly at first.
Giving it a trial run might be okay though I'd lean towards leaving things as-is.
Does kind of feel like the overall community wouldn't be too thrilled. I'm having a hard time understanding why the instance would be entertaining a change now. Like I can't think of any communities I care to participate in over there, just seems like spamming up people's All feed for no discernible benefit.
OTOH you have a point, people can do instance blocking in their user settings so that is an option.
Do you mean old like DOS old, or you meant something like old Windows game?
If it's something like an old DOS game I'd maybe try DOSBox.. maybe there's something better but that'd be on the list of things to try.
EDIT: FreeDOS also exists, should be able to run that in an emulator / virtual machine and then load anything DOS compatible into it. There's a list of emulators / virtual machines they recommend in their download page https://freedos.org/
Slightly concerned about remote desktopping though. What do I replace xrdp with?
Xrdp works on Wayland, you can keep using it if you like. There's also Gnome's built-in Gnome Remote Desktop as well as KDE's Krdp, both are also Wayland compatible (though I get the feeling Krdp is still in its early stages).
If admins are okay with running both Lemmy and Piefed instances simultaneously then it seems fine IMO.
But otherwise don't feel strongly about it, I don't know that I'd actually use the Piefed instance unless something happens within the Lemmyverse side of things or issues with the dbzer0 Lemmy instance itself.
According to https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-keyboard-shortcuts.html.en you should be able to use Shift + Super + Page Up/Down to move application windows between workspaces, seems to work for me.
So for your example start Terminal, then maximize it (Super + Up Key), then move the application window to another workspace (Shift + Super + Page Up/Down).
Perhaps just uninstalling Nouveau and falling back to the Intel driver, if it's already installed, is sufficient? Or if that doesn't work, worst case OP could blacklist Nouveau and and update initramfs? I'm just guessing as long as the Nvidia driver is never actually active perhaps that's enough to avoid excess power consumption.
OTOH there isn't much harm in OP keeping Nouveau enabled and seeing how things go though I'm in agreement with you, on an older laptop there's not much advantage to be gained with the older Nvidia hardware.
All the loaded torrents in a torrent client already get stored somewhere in the torrent client's own settings folders. e.g. if you look in qBittorrent's settings folders you'll find a folder full of .torrent files representing every single torrent currently in the torrent client.
So if it's a torrent I'm going to leave loaded in the torrent client then no, there's no reason to save a second copy of the .torrent file. But I guess if it's a torrent I'm not going to load in the torrent client, or will remove it from there, then maybe it's worth saving depending how you do things.
I’m undecided. I figure if I save them and back them up to an offline/offsite device, then I can (mostly/hopefully) recover from hardware failure by simply re-adding all the torrent files to my favorite client.
It would be better just to back up your entire torrent client settings folders, you'll save all the .torrent files along with the save folders and other information you have in the torrent client.
Remmina and Xrdp are probably the better RDP clients at the moment. I've had no problems using either to connect to Windows 10 desktops but have not tested Windows 11.
FreeRDP is used by most (all?) Linux RDP clients, it does have its own active development.
Could also try the Linux RDP client that Thincast has, still uses FreeRDP in the backend like the others but it does seem work well at least with Windows 10 (https://thincast.com/en/products/client).
Also for what it's worth I've seen mention of a FreeRDP bug when the client fails to connect to Windows 11 with multi monitor enabled (since most Linux RDP clients use FreeRDP the bug affects them all too). Think the workaround for now is to disable multi-monitor in the RDP client settings before attempting to connect. Think it is getting fixed in the next FreeRDP release. No idea if that's your issue but worth a look (e.g. https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/issues/3403)
Still learning this myself but I've found that Xrdp is Wayland compatible so there's that if you want to remote using RDP protocol.
Gnome has its own version called Gnome Remote Desktop that is also Wayland compatible.
And for KDE its own KRdp is another RDP protocol remote server that is Wayland compatible (https://github.com/KDE/krdp). I haven't tested the KDE version yet but I'd guess it works similarly to Gnome Remote Desktop and Xrdp, AFAIK they all use FreeRDP in the backend.
All the Linux RDP servers seem to have their own quirks but seem okay for personal day-to-day use least.
Beyond RDP solutions you could also check out stuff like RustDesk and NoMachine, they seem to be Wayland compatible as well. Though I am curious what else people use.
PS - Gave up looking for a Wayland compatible VNC, not sure if VNC will sort of die out as more and more Linux distros switch over to Wayland.
Check the log file & see if there's any additional information you can troubleshoot with. According to your .conf it's in /var/log/samba/log.%m
And/or maybe increase the logging level and hopefully when the issue re-occurs you'll have lots more log info to work with. (may have to be careful with the log file sizes though) Not sure if you need to enable client specific logging or maybe just working with the main smb.conf file is enough, see the wiki
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Client_specific_logging
EDIT: If you're not already seeing any logs maybe you do need to try enabling client specific logging (?)