Steam on Linux is now truly amazingly good. I run Debian but have a separate Windows PC for games. I haven't booted it for months. Steam's proton implementation is a game changer (bad pun, intended) . I bought a new AMD graphics card. I did not install it in my dedicated Win 10 gaming PC. It went into my Debian PC where it actually gets used for all kinds of things and also is great for games.

Yes, maybe. It depends. But if the aim is to run Libre Office they why does the OS even matter? I've been living on Ubuntu & Debian since 2006. It's quite some time since I felt evangelical about OS. I think Debian is the most reliable, least mad, least exploitative OS out there. And if others prefer something else, so what?

Libre Office runs on Windows too. And Mac OS. If the concern is the integrity and interoperability of the documents then the underlying OS should not matter.

The author imagines he has been investing. He hasn't. He has been purchasing products which are worth less the second he opens the box, and continue to devalue. That they also become less useful is his complaint. Replacing the words buy or purchase with invest is pure marketing deceit, intended to make spending money of non-essentials or luxury goods seem wise, but it seems like everyone has absorbed the lie.

My confusion is now expanding.

What worries me is that if the universe is expanding, then what the hell is it expanding into?

I came across Ubuntu at the 5.10 release and actually started using it as my everyday thing at 6.06 Previously had been on Windows 2000 on my very expensive Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook and then tried Suse. But Ubuntu 6.06 was great. Really well implemented and if you had a laptop with Intel graphics and wifi it did truly work out of the box, or near enough. The great benefit for me, personally, was that it gave me a Debian system which worked. So I learned some ins and outs of Debian. And 17 years later I'm using Debian, not Suse or Ubuntu. Because sometimes Ubuntu just added complexity where none was needed. Its Universe repository was like a repo for vulnerable old packages. At the time Debian was essentially sclerotic in terms of updates and upgrades and Ubuntu filled the gap. These days the Debian installer is better, the packages are fresh, there are very few reasons to try a derivative.

You can evade this upgrade, as I found out by chance. I dual boot Debian and Windows, and the original Windows I had was 10 and I installed it with Secure Boot disabled and kept it that way. I later upgraded via Windows Update to 11 and that worked fine. However I noticed that I could not get recent updates. They would download but always fail to install. I went into the BIOS and enabled Secure Boot and then I was able to update to the newest version of 11 via a downloaded ISO image, and now the PC upgrades normally via Windows Update. I had to chroot into Debian from a live CD with Secure Boot shim support and rebuild the initramfs and update GRUB, and now have both OS working fine with Secure Boot.

Anyway, if you are determined to stick with last year's versions then install Win 10 with Secure Boot disabled and leave it disabled and proceed to upgrade to 11 via Windows Upgrade and it will stop at 22H2.

Fu Manchu created an amazing secret tunnel through the core of the Earth and stole the contest from where it is usually held (probably a cheap lot just outside Hollywood, or a warehouse near London).

Also banning...messages from aliens (even the real ones), and all terrestrial messages in funny foreign languages (British English, French, Hindi).

ChromeOS Flex is fabulous...until it's your only choice and you have to actually use it.

Only if you pissed yourself laughing.

California Bill...is he in any way related to Florida Man? I think we should be told.

I have an up to date version of nmap from distro repos. Zenmap from repos? Not available.

It can be useful for apps which are dropped by distributions. For example on Debian zenmap (gui version of nmap) is no more. The easiest way to get it is a flatpak.

A more important app for me was displaycal as I need a colour managed display for photo editing. It had become useless as hadn't made the transition from python2 to python3 and no longer worked. A flatpak version solved that very nicely for the period before a working version again became available in a distro repo.

I agree that it's pretty much pointless using flatpaks for apps easily available in the same versions in distro repos but for me it has been occasionally incredibly useful. It's also quite useful for trying out a different version of an app. For example maybe you run a stable distro and would prefer not to mix in testing or experimental packages.