You should check out BraveOS at this point I think.

lol

It’s already like that on Xiaomi phones for a while. They don’t let you install anything outside of Play Store. Even if you install them via unlocking developer options and using adb, they just won’t run.

It sounds like you would enjoy Linux though you should at least know that running your games will need additional hoops comparing to Windows since they’re Windows games, nothing something wild and will be mostly about changing the default WINE to Proton if you use Lutris or Heroic for them. However sometimes you will probably need to troubleshoot for some game time to time, but you’ll get used to that once you learn the idea.

Linux Mint is likely the safest choice here. Zorin is also fine for newbies.

Also note that, a lot of things will be different than Windows, though you can always search for an equivalent for something you used. At least the structure is much more beautiful on Linux, unlike Windows’ chaotic nature.

Ottoman one should be “French disease” as well though. While Frenk was used as European as in general, it comes from French.

Yeah, it’s actually quite clean as an interface. Though I also like my graphs. :)

You’re welcome! I also learned it from someone else on Lemmy. :)

Didn’t know about Tickmate. I see why you like it. I guess if I didn’t start with Track & Graph and met Tickmate first, I would go with it. I think both are great on their own.

Had no idea but there is a difference between straight out vibe-coding and making it fix the code. Still not ideal though.

I use:

• Droid-ify for better F-Droid

• Aegis for 2FA

• Capy Reader for RSS

• Broccoli for recipes

• FluffyChat for Matrix

• Gadgetbridge for smart band

• Breezy Weather for weather

• Heliboard for keyboard

• IronFox as browser (you need to add its repo though)

• KeePassDX as KeePass vault

• Kitsune for Kitsu interaction

• Librera Reader for ebooks and PDFs

• LibreSudoku for occasional sudoku

• Standard Notes for personal notes

• Joplin for general notes

• Markdownr for downloading articles as markdown, then I pass them to Joplin

• Molly for Signal client

• mpv for videos

• NetGuard for firewall

• CoMaps for general map/GPS needs

• PipePipe for Youtube and PeerTube

• RustDesk for remote access

• SD Maid 2 for system cleaner

• SicMu Neo for music player

• SimpleLogin for email aliases

• Sky Map for stars

• Stocks Widget for stock market

• Sumire for Japanese keyboard

• Termux for terminal needs

• Track & Graph for habit tracker

• Trail Sense for outdoor activities

• Tuta Mail for email

• Voyager for Lemmy

• Yet Another Call Blocker for blocking calls (even though it doesn’t get updates for a long time still works for me)

• And core apps from Fossify

Eh, it’s totally fine. Think about it as writing to a penfriend from a really far country. :)

I see, they’re solving the issue other way around then by using raid. Didn’t know smartmontools work with a database, so it works kind of like an antivirus in a way. Interesting.

By the way, again it’s just my experience but I want to ask this. Have you noticed faulty disks are more common in NVMe SSDs than HDDs or I happen to noticed that because it’s common in cheaper options and more expensive ones are actually worth the price?

I see. So, you’re saying that occasionally checking smartctl (or having smartd as a daemon continuously), running badblocks time to time and maybe checking iostat not really enough? I mean, Linux is by far the most used OS on servers and datacenters, if these are not enough someone would write a proper tool I guess, don’t you think?

They’re way too expensive especially on bigger sizes. I want one as my second monitor but I won’t be able to get one soon.

By the way, you can still create a distraction-free environment for yourself with GUI. Just go with a minimal setup, something like Niri, Sway, river etc. (Openbox, bspwm, i3wm, Xmonad, dwm if you prefer X11).

The key points for distraction-free is to have a minimal desktop and using a program launcher like d-menu, fuzzel or rofi. TUI programs also help a lot. This way you won’t need a second OS setup and can do everything in the same installation because TTY is restrictive for certain things.

There are also distraction-free GUI programs that you can use. For example I prefer ghostwriter as my go-to markdown editor, Apostrophe is also great if you prefer GTK. Depending on your use cases, there are a lot of programs like these.

I agree though I use them as TLDR in this context and they’re generally fine with that as far as I can tell. Otherwise it’s a long output to check but I usually check the entire output anyway.

If the drive’s firmware is faulty, SMART data will be faulty too. But can you say the percentage is somewhat high from what you dealt with, a little statistics? What I saw is my personal experience and it’s definitely wouldn’t be accurate as yours. I only saw a drive died out of nowhere a handful of times which is not high if I make it into a percentage.Though if the drive itself is faulty, it won’t take long for it to die too.

The best I saw is a WD Caviar Black 500 GB drive from 2011 we use, still kicking. Took a backup because of its age a couple years ago but haven’t died yet. The worst I saw was my friend’s NVMe SSD that died in 3 months after he installed. Probably its firmware was also faulty because SMART didn’t help that time.

While it’s true we don’t really need those old tools anymore, unless one have ancient hardware. On Linux we can use badblocks to test the hard drive. This is from Arch Wiki:

Modern HDDs and SSDs include firmware that will automatically detect, attempt to correct, and report errors. However, firmware becomes aware of a corrupted sector only upon an attempt to read or write to it. Badblocks may be used to test the entire device at once. It operates by sequentially attempting to read and optionally write to and read back every sector on a drive, and report errors. Consequently, the firmware will react to any detected failures in this process.

So, for most cases SMART data is actually sufficient. And there is badblocks if you want to check the entire disk. However we don’t have manufacturer tools like Windows has.

A little warning about badblocks. Don’t do a write test if you have important stuff on it because it will erase the disk.

It’s a great distro to build from ground up though, really fun.

smartmontools is good.

Install smartmontools package for your distro, if it’s not already installed. Then

Check your disk’s name with sudo lsblk. After that, replace your_disk with your disk’s name (sda, nvme0n1 etc.) in the command below.

sudo smartctl -x /dev/your_disk

If the results say PASSED, you’re probably good. You can also pass the output to an LLM by the way. At least they are good at these kind of things.