I generally point the direction you do, few of these are hard and fast rules for me.

Wayland

This problem is taking care of itself. It was kind of rough there for a bit but except for certain “we focus on legacy devices” distros most either have or are working on Wayland support.

PipeWire

Yeah audio is still a sore spot in Linux, and frankly in PCs in general. Why do I need some janky piece of software called ALSAJackRetask to plug a 5.1 surround sound system into a Linux PC? Why can’t I select that from the DE’s audio manager dialog? Audio is too brittle, it needs annealing.

Desktop Environment

Most of what I do is steer folks around Gnome. I have a particularly loud impatience for Gnome’s Not Like The Other Girls energy. Unless you’ve got weird hardware limits that require a lightweight DE like LXDE, I’m going to install KDE or Cinnamon. Cinnamon, as far as I know, is lagging a bit with Wayland adoption, so on newer hardware for the moment I’m aiming folks at KDE, though I think Cinnamon is comfier for those transitioning existing hardware.

What I Recommend

Fedora KDE or Mint Cinnamon, maybe Fedora Kinote or Bazzite for a mostly entertainment box.

What I Recommend Against

• Any GNOME based distro.
• Ubuntu, they’ve sketched me out more than once.
• Arch or any Arch-based distro, because if you’re going Arch you’re your own problem.
• SteamOS for the moment, because it’s kind of hacky how you have to go about it.
• Kali, TAILS, anything that is designed for weird edge cases, because they’re for weird edge cases.
• Bazzite, for your only or main computer. I’ve been playing with it, and…I’m not so sure about it, but for a gaming rig or HTPC or something its worth a look.

Well…

I recently burned a Linux Mint live ISO to a thumb drive for repairing a PC that isn’t booting right into Windows. The ISO is about 2.8GB in size, doesn’t take that long to download or to write to a thumb drive. It also fits on a DVD if you’re still living in 2007. Bazzite’s ISO is 8.9GB. Takes a lot longer to download and longer to write. Bit of a pain.

Once you’ve got the ISO on a thumb drive, it boots to the typical GRUB menu asking “Install Bazzite, Test this media and install Bazzite, Quit or something.” Test this media is the default choice, and it fails and tells you not to use that media.

They offer a Live ISO version of Bazzite, though it’s marked as in beta. This allows you to use KDE’s settings to set things like scaling so you can read the text from the couch when setting up an HTPC. Problem is it tends to lock up. Through the time consuming process of picking options in the installer, the mouse cursor will just stop moving, and the only thing that works is Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a terminal and reboot the machine.

The plain installer doesn’t let you rescale the video, so pull an office chair into the living room to 4k your way through the installer. Anaconda…isn’t good. It’s got some of that Gnome minimialist jankiness to it. Mint’s installer is a series of screens you can go back and forward through, it’s a process. Anaconda is built like an N64 game, first you start out in the mandatory tutorial level where you do the language, time zone, keyboard layout, then you arrive in a hub level where you can choose the order you do things in…for some reason. This leads to a weird structure.

There’s a DONE button up in the very top-left corner of the screen. Not near the middle where all the other interaction is, Not near the bottom-right where most people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom would look to finde DONE, way in the top-left corner. Which is real fun to keep going between on a 4k monitor at 100% scale when the installer is designed for a 1080p monitor or less, and the mouse sensitivity is low. It also means that the DONE button can mean BACK or FORWARD depending on context, like in the partitioning menu, you select Manual partitioning and then hit DONE, and it takes you FORWARD to the manual partitioning dialog, then you click DONE again to go back to the main menu. But if you click automatic partitioning, DONE just takes you back. Mint’s installer is a linear series with a BACK and NEXT button that make more sense.

If you’ve got a system with more than one drive, and you want to put the root file system on one drive and /home on the other, especially to separate a game library or something, you have to do it the manual way. They give you two manual options, one doesn’t make sense. The other is a LOT fussier, you have to just know to make a /boot/efi, a /boot as EXT4 and / and /home as BTRFS, it takes a lot of clicks, it asks you if you’re sure a lot, and it throws a cryptic error and crashes out of the install if you get it wrong. Oh, you also have to know it’s /var/home, not /home as well. Like, the whole immutable thing just makes it more fussy about what its file system looks like. Can you even add a drive after the fact? Can an immutable distro be FSTABed?

It’s just…jankier. Having done it, I wouldn’t point a newbie to it.

I installed Bazzite a few days ago, and it was a bit of a pain.

closest we got is Peertube.

I have personally found Bazzite’s installer to be particularly brittle.

30 knots indicated would take a plane out of the sky too, that’s well below most airplane’s stall speeds. We can probably fix that before doing the Monsanto Slam though.

Fun fact: In several episodes of the original Star Trek series, Spock can be seen holding and using an E6B flight computer, which is a slide rule invented for the US Navy in World War 2.

Putting my flight instructor hat on here, this is mostly correct.

“Indicated airspeed” (IAS) is what number your aircraft’s airspeed indicator is pointing to. As Rivalarrival described, the airspeed indicator is a barometric instrument that compares ram air pressure with static pressure to measure the dynamic pressure, which is a function of airspeed. Indicated airspeed is an indication of how the airplane will “feel,” how much force will act upon the aircraft in maneuvers, which is why force limit speeds such as maximum flap and landing gear extended speeds, stall speeds, max normal operating speed and never exceed speed are marked on the airspeed indicator.

“Calibrated airspeed” (CAS) is indicated airspeed corrected for instrument error. The airspeed indicator and the plumbing it is hooked to aren’t perfect, so they’ll be off by a few knots especially near the lower edge of its range. You find a chart in the POH that says “IAS 45, 50, 55, 60 etc” on one line and “CAS 43, 49, 54, 60 etc” on another. Pilots use this for, if we’re being honest with ourselves, nothing.

“True airspeed” (TAS) is indicated airspeed corrected for air density. The airspeed indicator is flawed in concept: It’s a pressure gauge calibrated in units of speed. To actually determine the relative velocity of the aircraft through the air, we have to do a bit of math comparing the outside air temperature with our pressure altitude, this will give us our density altitude. You then do a bit more math to correct calibrated airspeed for density altitude and get true airspeed. E6B flight computers have little windows for this.

Here is my old cardboard E6B from when I was a student. I’ve set an air temperature of -40C over 30,000 feet in the right-hand window, the center window is showing…pretty much exactly 30k feet of density altitude, and we can read true airspeed over calibrated airspeed on the A and B scales. So for 100 knots, we can look at the 10 on the B scale, and read about 164, maybe 165 knots on the A scale. At 30,000 feet and +50C, which literally never happens, your density altitude is ~38,000 feet and 100 KCAS will get you 194 KTAS. Not quite 400 😜

“Ground speed” is true airspeed corrected for wind. To calculate your ground speed, you need your true airspeed as we just calculated, and winds aloft forecasts from one of the government agencies the Republicans are desperate to destroy, and then we do some trigonometry. You can whip out your Ti-83 Plus Silver Edition from high school and SohCahToa this bitch, or you can flip the E6B over to find a handy dandy vector plotter, which does ground speed and wind correction angle calculations by accurately drawing and measuring the triangle. My high school physics teacher called using this thing “cheating,” I call it “a required aeronautical skill.”

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Mind you that’s only Bazzite, Zorin has been making large gains as well.

I’m a long-time Mint guy, my current desktop is Fedora KDE because Wayland, and I’m looking at Bazzite for my old computer/HTPC but it doesn’t support my old GTX-1080 GPU, I might get a low-tier Radeon for it (I don’t want to buy an Intel card and fuck Nvidia’s butt, that GTX-1080 was literally the only GPU available to me in 2020).

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I don’t think we have the capacity to launch a million people into orbit in 20 years, let alone all the stuff they need. I mean, 1 million people weigh about 150 million pounds, and that’s just meat and bones. .

I think a better quote would be

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

I picked up a thing that just now came out of early access, called The Farmer Has Been Replaced(). It’s a Python coding game, you’re given a grid-based farm and a drone that runs Python code you write for it to plant, water, harvest etc. crops. It’s a decent little coding exercise, not the worst way to learn Python.

I’ll take a stab at this.

The Scientific Method, as I was taught it from middle school to college:

1. Observe a phenomenon.
2. Raise a question about said phenomenon.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Form a hypothesis as to the nature of the phenomenon.
5. design an experiment to test that hypothesis against a control.
6. Analyze the data yielded by experiment.
7. Repeat the experiment to verify it isn’t a fluke.
8. Publish all of the above in sufficient detail that other scientists may examine your work for flawed methodology and repeat your experiments to further verify it isn’t a fluke.
9. Conclude whether your hypothesis is or is not supported by experimental evidence.

THIS WORKS

What is being done all over the world right now:

1. Get hired by a multinational corporation traded on the Dow Jones.
2. Be assigned a fact to prove, probably about an existing product.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Design an experiment that will support the fact you’re looking to prove.
5. Use a very small sample size.
6. Conclude something wishy-washy like “there’s a statistically significant correlation”.
7. Publish a densely written paper with a very convoluted title in some obscure sketchy journal somewhere.
8. Cite that paper in your own press releases with headlines that blow the conclusion way out of proportion.
9. No one ever follows up on any of this, the experiment is never really peer reviewed, or is reviewed by others engaged in similar nonsense, and the public only ever reads the headline.

A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.