flubba86

+1 for Fedora. It is exactly what OP is asking for.

You must be matured around my age talking about discmans like that. Although, The last "discman" i bought was a portable CD player, and wireless earbuds didn't exist.

Yes, that's what I'm referring to. All of the earphones listed above are wired earphones, and look like the kind included for free from a old portable cd player.

I concur. VE Monk and it's successor Monk Plus are the best $5 earphones you'll ever use. They compete against earphones in the $100-$150 category. Don't let their appearance fool you, they look like a cheap crappy plastic pair you'd get for free with a discman. But their audio quality is phenomenal.

I'll note here, the VE Monk success has spawned a bunch of competitors in the very-cheap-but-shockingly-good category, notably look at the Faaeal Snow Lotus and Faaeal Iris, I have both and they are great.

I got a new pair of VE Monk Plus about 10 months ago, from AliExpress, but I haven't looked recently.

Last week I bought one of those giant vacuum insulated travel mugs (not a Stanley) from a discount variety store, along with a bunch of other things. After I paid, the cashier asked "do you want the receipt?", I normally say no, but this time for some reason I said yes. After I left the store, my kids needed to use the restroom, so while they went I sat down on the bench and absently looked through the receipt in my hand. I immediately noticed I got charged twice for the mug. The cashier must've double scanned it. I went back to the store, showed a manager my receipt, and they refunded me the difference.

That was technically my last refund, but the last product I actually returned was a set of tws (true-wireless-stereo) IEMs (fancy earbuds). They were a brand new model just released with great reviews, I bought them from Amazon, received them, and used them about a week. During that week I noticed every time they were in my ears, my ear canals got super irritated and my ears felt warm. And whenever I removed them the insides of my ears would be crazy itchy for hours afterwards. It got to a point after a week of use that my ear canals would swell and close up about 15 minutes after I put the earbuds in my ears. Didn't take a rocket surgeon to work out I was allergic to whatever material that earphone was made of. I still had the box and all the packaging, submitted a return to Amazon with the comment "my ears are allergic to those earphones" and they accepted it no problems, I got a full refund.

Oh man, I have all of these! Pain in the head behind the eyes when the alarm goes off, prolonged squinting with certain kinds of bright lights, I get physical pain in my head from specific outdoor sounds like a very loud motorcycle exhaust.

But most striking of all, I have the pain response to tickling. If someone tries tickling me anywhere on my body my back spasms and my diaphragm contracts, my vision goes black and I have to concentrate to stop myself from yelling and screaming. It's not the same as regular pain like a cut or bruise or a burn, is more like someone tasering me.

I've always been pretty sensitive to tickling since I was a kid, but it got way worse after I got a pinched nerve in my back about 10 years ago.

I was also very mildly on the autism spectrum when I was a kid, then I was neurotypical from puberty until my early 30s, now nearly 40 I'm back deep into the spectrum.

But surely the carbon footprint of mailing the heads back to be recycled does more harm to the planet than not recycling the heads? Seems like a bit of green thumb theatre.

Like when everyone a couple years ago were collecting their plastic bread tags to send to that guy in Africa who was turning them into recycled plastic bricks to make a house. Seriously, just bin the bread tags and send him $10, you'll save yourself $15 in international shipping costs, and he cound buy 1000 bread tags, or even better a bunch of pre-made bricks, and we don't have to be mailing our trash all around the world.

"We're here about the homicide. Where's the body?"

"Nope, ain't nothing here except 60 litres of strawberry smoothie".

1. I usually stick with distros that have large userbases. I've tried smaller and niche distros before, and inevitably they stop being maintained, or move in a direction I don't like. The larger distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, have more resources (people, time, money) to spend on testing updates, and have reliable update schedules. When I was younger I didn't care about that kind of thing, but these days I use my PC almost exclusively for work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, I need my PC to not break when I update it.

Another technique I use is to go to the vendor site for software I use and look at which Linux distros they officially support. Usually they will publish at least an Ubuntu package, sometimes a universal deb file that works on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. Sometimes an RPM package for Fedora/CentOS too. This is getting less relevant these days with Appimage files and Flapak images that work the same across all distros.

It's natural to get bored or frustrated with one distro and want to try out others. Imagine if Microsoft made many different flavours of Windows that each look and operate differently, everyone who is bored and frustrated with default Windows would be trying them all out, comparing them, debating the pros and cons, communities would form around common favourites.

I have a small gaming PC that I use to test out other distros, I'm currently on Nobara, that I actually highly recommend for a gaming-focused distro.

2. This one is really hard to say. It depends on so many factors like what hardware you are running, what software you plan to run, how tech savvy you are, even your definition of what is an issue. Mint is very stable and easy to use, you may run into zero issues getting it installed, running VSCode, playing some Factorio. Or you might run into a small incompatibility between your GPU and the bundled kernel drivers and run into a whole world of hurt spending days tinkering on the command line with no usable graphics driver.

3. I believe Mint still comes with the Cinnamon Desktop, that is specifically designed to be familiar and easy for users transitioning from Windows. It's not super customisable, but I think it can do what you described. I'm not the best person to answer, I haven't used Mint or Cinnamon since 2012.

4. File extensions are optional in Linux for some kinds of files. Linux usually tries to identify a file type using a "Magic string", meaning it will read the first 8 to 16 bytes of the start of a file and will be able to tell with a great deal of accuracy what kind of file it is. Executables, drivers, shell scripts, and many others use this method and do not need a file extension. You can definitely still use extensions though. Eg, libre Office will still save documents with a doc extension (.odt). Often Linux will use a combination of both the magic string and the file extension to determine the file type. Eg, the magic string identifies it as an open office file, and the extension tells you it's a document kind of office file.

Your Linux photo editor will still save images with a .png or .jpeg extension, because these are the convention (and may be required if you will be opening those files on a different OS). Similarly, your project files created on Windows will still work fine on Linux (if the equivalent Linux app supports that file format).

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don't even know if you will like it, and don't know if you want to learn it's mechanics) then Arch wouldn't be my first choice.

I bought a Miele S8 off marketplace about 5 years ago. After I bought it, I did some research and found the same thing you did. The S8 was the most powerful vacuum that Miele ever made, and used a motor made in Germany. After that model they replaced it with the C3 that is almost identical except uses a Chinese motor.

I can't even imagine the sheer satisfaction that comes from eradicating millions of mosquitoes per day.