Vims defaults are quite crap overall. It is why everyone needs 100s of lines of configs and many plugins to turn it into something decent. Well worth the setup but it could go a long way to making things nicer to use out the box.

The problem is ides inlining only part of the error and generally skip all the helpful text on how to fix the error.

From what I can tell xbps-src are just the source packages to the main repos in Void. That is not what AUR is. We have access to the main repo sources in Arch just like Void. The main thing about AUR is anyone can contribute without any gated approvals. That is the big difference between the main source repos of either distro and AUR. Unless I have misunderstood what xbps is.

but looking at templates they can actually understand its kinda simple script and get the idea of how it works

Same exact idea with PKGBUILDs. No benefit to Void here. The way Void does things will not change people looking at or understanding the packages they install. You have the same optitunities on both systems for looking at the source of packages. So that argument for Void is void :)

Also void has runit so this mean u have to get more simple programs to run system like seatd dbus and etc.

Not really a good argument either. Systemd and runit are different but that doesn’t make runit better in terms of learning anything. If you want to learn how most Linux systems boot and operate you need to learn systemd as that is what the vast majority of distros use. Learning runit instead only means you are learning a niche way of booting a tiny fraction of systems.

Neither of these arguments are a very strong case for Void over arch.

XBPS-SRC does not look like an alternative to AUR at all. It looks like Voids alternative to https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages - where Arch maintains all its packages. Nor is comparing the number of packages in AUR to Void main repos a good idea - Arch has its own main repos that are a better equivalent. The Void templates do not look dissimilar form what a PKGBUILD file is either and you can do the same things with writing your own PKGBUILD or pulling them from repos if you really want to. I don’t see how void is any better then Arch in anything you have described here. IMO it just looks like it does more of the same things with a bit difference in syntax/commands you run. Nothing you have said here is really a solid argument for using Void or Arch at all.

The AUR is not even that great. I think most people seem to get confused between what is in the AUR and the main packages since they just use tools like yay that install from both. But most people only use a couple of packages from the AUR - it is the package selection in the main repos which is what is so nice about Arch. The AUR is just nice for more niche things that have not made it into the main repos yet.

I hope u don’t use AUR blindly and just do yay -S something without looking what pkgbuild is doing, it might be dangerous not knowing what program can do and what script that is downloading it too right?

Same goes for Void? Most people wont read the source of third party packages they install. No matter what distro they are on. AUR tooling does try to help with this but most people ignore it. Same will go for Void. It is not a distro problem - just a humans are lazy problem. Plus even if people did read them there is only a small subset of people that actually understand them enough to spot obviously malicious packages - though that can spot hidden malicious packages are vastly smaller.

252 of that 592 used memory is buffers/cache, not application memory. That is used by the kernel for kernel buffers and the filesystem cache - IE files read by something at some point. The kernel keeps them in memory in case they are needed again to speed up file reads. You can effectively ignore these vales as they will always grow to fill your ram and will be evicted when programs require memory and there is not enough free.

These tools are not lieing to you, just telling you something other then what you are reading into them. Tracking and reporting on what is using memory is a complex topic and here used is just what is physically allocate. It doesn’t mean much over all as it always tends to be full of your system has been running for a decent amount of time. Available is typically the more useful one to look at as it is an estimate about how much the kernel can reclaim now if an application request it without needing to swap things out.

Can you share the output of free? There are multiple values to read from that.

None of that describes why a beginner would not want to use a immutable distro. It only describes why it is not a good idea if you want to learn how traditional linux distros work. Not all beginners want to learn or care about how linux works under the hood and immutable distros can be a good fit for them. They might not be right for OP, but you have not describe any reason why any beginner should avoid them.

I saw some people using Arch to learn the inside out of Linux, but I’m afraid It could be to challenging.

It will be challenging but IMO give it a shot if you think it is something you might want to do. No harm in trying really. If you mess it up or find it too hard or whatever you can always install something else afterwards. It is not like you are stuck with your first choice forever. The only thing you will lose is a bit of time and will gain a better understanding of things even if you cannot make it fully work.

I don’t agree that arch is not a beginner distro - it is a DIY distro that requires a lot of reading and willingness to learn and understand things. The arch wiki is an excellent resource for anyone (on any distro IMO) and well worth reading. If you are OK with that work then it makes a fine distro for anyone, beginner or not. It is not a distro for many people - again does not matter if they are a beginner or not. It is for people with a particular mindset. One that you might change over time or as you grow and learn more overall.

No harm either if you decide it is not for you. Play around with a few distros and try to find which one works best for you. There is really no one best distro. Just a lot of different things that appeal to different people and the only real way to find out which you like is to try them out.

But why won’t anyone think of the AI shareholders…

That is the type of thinking that causes a massive amount of CVEs in those languages.

Hey, the design specs never said the program shouldn’t blast out and air raid siren at full volumn every time the user clicks a button. Cannot be a bug, must be user error.

If you want to be safe backup anything you care about before hand. Assume that you might end up needing to wipe the system and reinstall everything. Encrypting the Linux partitions should not affect windows but there are so many other steps that could go wrong when partitioning and installing a system it is better to backup everything you care about just incase.

Passwords can be secure when the end user picks a strong one. But that is the biggest problem with them, the end user. They don’t pick good passwords and decades have shown us the general public are bad at passwords.

Passkeys are not biometrics. They are much simpler. In a very simple way you can think of them as a secure long random password that is stored on you device, generated per device, and not sent over the wire to the other side (so more like public/private key cryptography I believe).

The passkey on your device can be stored in an encrypted vault or even secure hardware that requires a pin/password or key to unlock.

They are not getting rid of multifactor codes and can be used with them. But by protecting them locally you can still have 2 factors to access them - the hardware/vault that contains them and the pin/password/biometric that unlocks the vault. And that is in addition to server side multifactor systems.

But even without all that you still gain massive benefits over passwords as it stops cross site comprises when one sites gets their password database leaked. Or brute forcing access to systems by guessing weak passwords that most people use.

You should have a live USB of the distro you want to use and ensure you have backups of all the data you care about. Then the easiest/quickest/least error prone way is to just wipe the whole drive and reinstall the distro from the live USB. They typically have an option to wipe and install things from an empty drive. Then just restore your data from your backups.

You could also, after creating backups, from a live USB environment delete the windows partitions and resize the linux ones - being careful not to delete the EFI partition as that is where the boot loader lives. You can optionally delete the windows boot loader from the EFI partition as well. If done right you should still be able to boot into your linux system afterwards though when missing with partitions like this, especially when you don’t know what you are doing, it can be easy to break the boot systems. These can be fixed from a live environment and there are many guides out there on how to do that.

You can always just reinstall the system again if you mess things up and cannot figure out how to fix them - so always prep for that case by backing up everything you care about first.

I don’t have a second internal drive, so I’ll probably use an external hard drive or cloud storage.

Best to get both. Two copies of the data is better then one. Ideally have three. One being remote is also a plus as that will protect you in case your house burns down or something else drastic.

1.What’s the best way to back up and restore my data safely while preserving all metadata?

There is no real best way. Loads of things can be used to achieve the same purpose. But there are two main end goals: either copy/sync the data with a tool that can preserve timestamps or use a tool that can archive the data into a single file (that can optionally be compressed - like zip). Or for cloud providers they typically have their own tools that can do the syncing for you and will typically preserve timestamps by default. Just find one with a sync tool that also works on Linux.

There are loads of backup tools for windows that can do these things - though you should use one that does not use its own propriety format but instead something more open that can be read from the Linux side. I don’t use windows these days so cannot advice on what the best tools here are.

Otherwise you can do this from a Linux Live USB using Linux based tools. If you are fine with the CLI then a simple way is to just mount the drives and use the rsync cli utility to sync the data you want across. rsync also lets you cancel and resume the sync which can be handy for larger directories. Or use the archiving tool tar to create a archive of the data on the other drive (this can be optionally compress). You should be able to use the filemanager to create archives as well which might make things a bit easier and should preserve timestamps - but just copying the data in a filemanager I don’t think tends to preserve timestamps though so best to use the CLI for that or a dedicated tool.

What ever you decide to do test it on a small folder first and see if it does what you expect/want it to before committing to copying large amounts of data.

3.How can I access or use files that are only supported by Windows once I’ve switched to Linux? Are there workarounds or compatibility layers?

This depends on the file formats you care about. Some things are already supported by native Linux programs, others are not. Some windows only programs can work in compatibility tools like WINE - but I would only do that as a last resort. Personally I would figure this out before you reinstall your system. Start by finding Linux friendly programs for the files you need to use and see if they work with the files you want - if not try converting them before switching. Most Linux programs can also run on Windows so it is best to find these alternative and test them out before wiping your windows install. You can also boot up a Live USB and check things that way before committing to a install and wiping your system.

You can also (in addition to backing things up properly) buy a new SSD for your laptop and swap them around - keeping the original install in place in case there is something you forgot or need to switch back to access some old program you didn’t think about.

Battery self discharge is measured in days at worst, more typically weeks or months. It should not be dropping 5% over the course of an hour or so even if the device is a bit warm. Plus having it plugged in should start charging again once the battery starts dropping too low.

You shouldn’t see the battery drop if it is not using the battery, which is what pass through would suggest.

They changed it recently where you can have two members of a family able to play two different games at ones (or rather number of copies of the game at once).

But that requires different accounts even if one account owns all the games.

--asdeps also works when installing something to immediately mark it as a dep. Can be useful for non dep packages if you only need it temporarily as it will be removed the next time you purge unused deps.

Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

And remember that you can recover from anything, even removing base packages or bootloader ones with a live cd and chroot or using pacman with a different root with the --root /mnt flag to pacman.

Otherwise if your system still boots it is just a matter of following the install instructions for whatever is not working like you did the first time.