I’d much rather deal with Linux issues than windows, but that’s just me.

It’s not just you. ;)

Why?

I wish the filters and most housings weren’t made of plastic.

…but they are known for being privileged and insulated.

You should be aware that Blizzard/Microsoft make changes to Battle.net somewhat often, and they have a habit of breaking it in Wine. It might work fine for a week or a year, only to get an update and suddenly misbehave or fail completely until the community has time to figure out what changed and develop a fix.

On a few occasions, the breakage has been in a new version of drive_c/ProgramData/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.*. People who still had the older version installed were able to work around it by removing all permissions from the new version’s directory and marking it immutable with chattr. Battle.net then fell back to using the previous version, allowing games to run until a fix in Wine was developed.

Also, fixes make it into some Wine variants faster than others. For example, last time I dealt with this stuff, I found that the GE-Proton9-27 build of Wine handled Blizzard games pretty well while others did not.

With all that in mind, I wonder if the problems you’ve been seeing are not rooted in your Vulkan drivers, but instead the usual pattern of Battle.net updates fighting with Wine. It’s possible that you’ll just have to accept Blizzard games breaking on Linux every once in a while, and when they do, updating the Wine runner you use in Lutris when one with a fix becomes available.

It’s wild how far off the rails a person’s thinking can go through a lifetime of privilege and societal insulation.

Tree-like hierarchy is used all over the place, including computers, because it’s a useful and easily understood way to organize information.

Why can’t I have a file in two folders?

You can. man ln

Why does one have to be a “reference”?

I don’t know what you mean by that. If you mean a link target, it doesn’t. A file is canonically identified by its inode (or equivalent), not where it appears in a directory tree.

Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?

You can. Common tools like find can do this, as can some file managers like Dolphin, and various indexing tools.

If you mean to ask why that sort of indexing/filtering isn’t built in to most filesystems, consider compatibility: Practically no software exists that would know how to take advantage of it. Also consider what it would mean for a filesystem to filter by files that exist in 3 folders if that filesystem doesn’t use folders. :)

(BTW, that “extension” concept doesn’t exist in most modern filesystems. Any .xyz suffix you see in the ones that don’t come from Microsoft is just part of the file name, with no special meaning. Some programs try to guess at content type based on common file name suffixes, but that is unreliable and has nothing to do with the fs.)

Since you’re interested in this topic, though, maybe have a look at different approaches to data storage that have been tried over the years. To get you started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system#Database_file_systems

I was impressed with GPUI’s description of how they render text, and hope that it either grows into a general purpose GUI toolkit, or inspires one with a similar approach. It has a long way to go, though.

You might find this interesting:
https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component

In the meantime, Qt is still the only cross-platform desktop toolkit that does a convincing job of native look and feel. If you’re not married to Rust, you might have a look at these new Qt bindings for Go and Zig:
https://github.com/mappu/miqt
https://github.com/rcalixte/libqt6zig

This equation might change a bit as more software users learn how bloated apps affect their hardware upgrade frequency & costs over time. The RAM drought brings new incentive to teach and act on that knowledge.

Management might be a bit easier to convince when made to realize that efficiency translates to more customers, while bloat translates to fewer. In some cases, developing a native app might even mean gaining traction in a new market.

Relevant community: !sustainabletech@lemmy.sdf.org

many chat applications written in Electron, none of which are interoperable.

This is one of my pet peeves, and a noteworthy example because chat applications tend to be left running all day long in order to notify of new messages, reducing a system’s available RAM at all times. Bloated ones end up pushing users into upgrading their hardware sooner than should be needed, which is expensive, wasteful, and harmful to the environment.

Open chat services that support third party clients have an advantage here, since someone can develop a lightweight one, or even a featherweight message notifier (so that no full-featured client has to run all day long).

Posted to YouTube a few hours ago, by the office of New Jersey senator Cory Booker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiehEMlNiCI

https://web.archive.org/web/20251223001713/https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment-bari-weiss-killed/

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361169

Some well-known Amazon subsidiaries listed on Wikipedia:

• Whole Foods Market
• Audible
• Ring

According to the Debian Wiki, merely having a salsa account is not sufficient.

When you login on debusine.debian.net with Salsa for the first time, if you are a Debian developer or a Debian maintainer, then a Debusine account is automatically created. The username of that account is your primary email on salsa.debian.org.

To verify if you are a Debian developer, it relies on the group membership exported by Salsa: if you are part of the debian group on salsa, then the account is created and it is added to the Debian group on debusine.debian.net.

To verify if you are a Debian maintainer, it will query nm.debian.org to know if that salsa identity is known to be a Debian Maintainer. If yes, then the account is created and it is added to the Maintainers group.

Edit, to address the last line in your comment:

The value of Ubuntu’s PPA service is it gives anyone a managed and hosted repository and a multi-architecture build farm, for free, so you don’t have to self-host. Self-hosting Debusine would not be comparable.

If a self-hosted Debian repository is all you want, that has been possible forever, using any of a variety of tools.

By copypasta, I meant that you are bulk copying posts from other communities.

And apparently with no regard for the veracity of what you’re re-posting.

You already posted copypasta about this, two days ago, and it’s still false.

Only Debian developers and Debian maintainers can create a Debusine repository. That’s not “PPA-like” in any practical way. The value of Personal Package Archives (PPAs) is that anyone can create them.

I think you chose well with Mint. It is based on Ubuntu, but has a track record of stripping out Canonical’s nonsense, and if said nonsense should ever become impractical to remove, Mint already has a contingency plan in the form of their Debian Edition.

Someone said that LMDE is behind in various ways,

Someone on social media is always echoing the meme about Debian being unusable due to old packages, but roughly 96% of the time, that person turns out to be poorly informed and driven by an unhealthy addiction to quickly rising version numbers. Try not to give their opinion much weight, despite how loud and repetitive they are.

including NVIDIA graphics drivers

Why would “non-tech-savvy seniors” care what version of the Nvidia driver is installed?

Edit: To answer the question in your headline, putting the /home directory on a separate partition tends to make switching distros easy.

Before buying a new mobo, I hope you’ll reset the BIOS settings to safe defaults and see if that clears any problems.

If you do end up buying a new one, I suggest one that supports ECC RAM. (I think Asus officially and Asrock unofficially support ECC, but I haven’t kept up on available options in a year or two.)

Edit: Also, I hope you haven’t overlooked power supply failure as a possibility. Some people forget that component, or don’t realize what weird problems can come from it being underpowered.