I did a similar upgrade last year. I don’t recall any problems under Debian. I now have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which my old mobo did not support.

Of course, you should be sure to do a full backup.

We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

I will watch this from afar with great interest.

TL;DR: you won’t notice the difference. That’s the beauty of Stable. :)

If you need new drivers then Debian is not the easiest distro. I love Debian but I do occasionally consider distro-hopping again to get some complex things working (like ROCm).

I do think Debian is an excellent starting place, though. If it suits you, great! If not, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to look for going forward. Hopping distros isn’t the end of the world, after all.

If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.

These don’t seem like competing needs. When I think “just work with minimal hassle”, I don’t think “I need to restrict myself to outdated hardware”.

I’m perfectly happy running old packages in general. I’m still on Plasma 5, and it works just as well as it did last year. But that’s a matter of features, not compatibility. Old is fine; broken is not.

Depends on the specifics. My high-end MacBook Pro uses active cooling, but in practice it almost never comes on. It’s wayyyyy more efficient than the previous Intel gen.

A week or two ago, I accidentally left a Python process running using 100% of a single core. I didn’t even notice for several hours, until it ate up all my RAM. On on Intel laptop the fan would’ve let me know in like two minutes.

I don’t think Qualcomm’s actually caught up to Apple yet, but it’s getting close. It’s good to see more competition.

BTRFS also supports deduplication, but not automatically. duperemove will do it and you can set it up on a cron task if you want.

That would be a somewhat valid argument if Snaps “just worked” any better than Flatpaks. That has not been my experience.

Given the choice between an open standard and a proprietary one, the proprietary one damn well better have meaningful technological advantages. I don’t see that with Snaps. All I see is a company pouring effort into a system whose only value is that they are pouring effort into it. They should put that effort into something better.

Granted, it’s been a few years since I used Ubuntu and Snaps. Perhaps things have improved. It was nothing but headaches for me. A curse upon whoever decided to package apps that obviously require full file system access as Snaps. “User-friendly”, indeed.

From an enterprise/server perspective, when what you’re really paying for is first-party support, I guess Snaps make more sense. But again, that effort could be put toward something more useful.

What’s this? A software app store?

It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.

Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.

If you’re only testing on one set of hardware, it isn’t going to tell the whole story. The results might be very different on an AMD vs Nvidia GPU, or even on a brand-new vs 1-3 generation old GPU.

Probably the most important thing for gaming is driver support and ease of installation. This sometimes runs directly counter to other general-purpose needs.

I’m still on the hunt for a distro where everything I need is easy to install. I don’t think any exist, primarily because GPU drivers suuuuuuuck, especially when you need CUDA or ROCm to work.

However, the Snapdragon X Elite is not too far off the M3 Pro, as Windows Latest highlighted. It’s running at about 80% of the speed of this Apple SoC

Uhhh. 80% the speed of Apple’s second-tier laptop chip doesn’t sound impressive to me.

People wear their glasses everywhere, including a variety of places where there is an expectation of privacy or where it is otherwise prohibited to record. Places where you would not be allowed to hold up your phone or camera and take photos.

The introduction of tech that makes it impossible to distinguish between someone minding their own business and someone recording you demands a change to the legal framework. It doesn’t make sense to hold to laws that were written for an entirely different scenario.

I don’t see people assaulting CCTV cameras for instance

I’ve seen that fairly often, particularly around political protests, and I’ve never seen a CCTV camera in a public bathroom, locker room, etc.

This tech is an inevitability and the potential legitimate uses are too valuable to ban it outright. But that doesn’t mean it should be treated exactly like a highly-visible camera or cell phone.

No way Linux is 32! I remember when it first came out and it was just…oh.

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be here yelling at the cloud.