Congratulations! I’m glad it worked well for you. Mint is a great choice as well.

Are you trolling?

I dont think the criticism of installing apps is valid. Windows also has many ways of installing things. He criticizes the app center as if you can install everything from the microsoft store. On windows you still install stuff from a website, and you can use a package manager too it just isn’t a requirement.

OBS Studio: There’s a community version but no official version of OBS for Linux.

This is incorrect, right? Im assuming had to install it somewhere else and presumed it wasnt official.

If youre on windows, mremoteng is very comprehensive: https://mremoteng.org/

Tinkering, really. I did a bunch of stuff with wine and virtualization and troubleshooted across versions. One time I manually updated the version of sqlite in python’s std lib to be a newer version. I picked a non LTS kernel once. All these things compounded and bloated my system. And when I went to do clean up, I didnt have a record of exactly everything I installed, what I used and what I didnt. It was guesswork to clean up my disk or even remember the tools I used to get a project working.

This is solved with declarative configuration, which is the basis of NixOS. I believe VanillaOS 2 has something similar. Likewise, this is one the great benefits of docker, vagrant, ansible, etc.

NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed…and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.

The two top of the line tools for making backups are restic and borgbackup (in my opinion). They would allow you to easily compress and encrypt some local directories to another computer or cloud service. I personally use borgbackup with external backups at borgbase.com

Love him. His lego island port has been a pleasure to watch.

I use borg the same way you describe. Part of my nixos config builds a systemd unit that starts a backup on various directories on my machine at midnight every day. I have 2 repos: one to store locally and on a cloud backup provider (borgbase) and another thats just stored locally. That is, another computer in my house. That local only is for all my home media. I havent yet put the large dataset of photos and videos on the cloud or offsite.