Hi!. Currently running Linux Mint 22.1, but i suspect it's not strictly a distro issue. This laptop was running VERY well but was outdated, running Mint 19.3, some things were unable to be installed because the system libraries were old (didn't expect Calibre to be one of them, figures), so i updated all the way to that moment's current version which was Mint 21.3. All of a sudden it felt like the laptop got downgraded two whole computer tech generations. As soon as i ask it to do something mildly complicated that made it break no sweat on Mint 19, it gets VERY slow, all the cores start running at max, system load increases, until it finishes doing whatever it was doing several minutes later, something between a couple of minutes when lucky, to 20 or more. Typically what triggers the issue is something on the browser (what i use the most on the computer is browser tabs and lots of terminals) but not exclusively. Thought it was the browser but replicated it on an empty Firefox profile, and has triggered with simpler stuff like the Discord client. Been trying to find the issue for a while trying to avoid a full reinstall, no luck so far.

If i were to describe how it feels, it's like there was a bottleneck on tasks being done by the system, as soon as you ask it to do something mildly complex it chokes on it and tasks accumulate. No idea if it's some kind of kernel misconfiguration, if it's some hardware incompatibility, or something else entirely, checking the changelogs of Mint all the way between 19.3 and 21.3 showed nothing i could pin this onto (or at least nothing i could notice).

The nuclear option would be a brand new blank install but I'd MUCH rather avoid that if possible, made the comfortable but now unwise choice of a single partition for everything (instead of a separate /home and whatnot as i used to do) so reinstallation would wipe it completely, if i must then i must but much rather not.

Would welcome VERY much ideas on stuff to check or try.

Edit: It's got an NVME drive, which seems to be healthy as far as i can see

Edit: When it happens it doesn't seem to matter how much RAM is free, seen it happen with only 8 of the 32Gb of RAM in use and zero swap

Edit: Found a great way to describe how it feels like: Have you done heavy video encoding on a computer that's adequate for the task but not more than that, and noticed how everything in it stalls heavily, even if there's plenty of RAM free and the computer feels like it's giving everything to that task only? Pretty much that, but for nearly everything even moderately heavy

I have a very old Facebook account i haven't touched for no less than 10+ years. I had decided to just let it decay under the reasoning that old data is worse than useless to them, but now in light of Facebook announcing they'll take it all to train for LLMs if you don't opt out, i am unsure if to continue leaving that account to rot, or if to recover it, opt out, then doing the delete procedure. What would you say is the best choice?

After arriving a while ago at the conclusion that the best option for reading comics/manga is a full-sized tablet instead of e-ink based devices, got an 8' Samsung tablet for not much. It serves the purpose but even with Blokada in it blocking everything it can, and every "privacy" option tuned to as closed as possible, i suspect it's still leaking TONS of data, and would like to root it if there's good choices for it. Do we have at least decent choices for Android tablets now in 2025? I search for this and people focus on phones with little to no attention to tablets

You have seen them, video clips grabbed off Instagram or TikTok have this EXTREMELY annoying logo and sound at the end (specially Instagram lately, doubly so with headphones). I'd like to just throw a script/command/Bash alias at any of these and have a resulting video without them, and ffmpeg IS the Swiss army knife of video processing, but it's syntax is NOT what you'd call simple. Does anyone have a recipe for this already?

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/2556883

I am very out of the loop with related recent tech, but once in a while i wish i had subtitles for internet clips, and i understand there's good tech out there for this these days. Is there something i can download in a typical headless Debian machine that i can then point at some MP4 clip to get subtitles? Even if imperfect it's better than trying to type that from scratch

A couple weeks ago Discord announced their plans to go down the IPO route. This means that there is now a ticking clock until the platform goes full-on enshittified like so many others before them.

Last time i checked last year there weren't many options to migrate to, mostly Matrix communities (which are not quite the same thing) and Revolt Chat (which is a non-federated but FOSS and self-hostable drop-in replacement for Discord). Revolt sounds like the logical route as it's clearly designed for just this exact role, but it seems it's still early in development and not yet ready for the average Discord user (looks like the voice functions in particular are still in development)

Has this changed or improved since then? I feel like the use case of "IRC servers, but modern!" should have been solved years ago but feels like it hasn't, i have lots of non-technical people who heavily use Discord who I'd love to rescue from it before it starts actively burning, a replacement that isn't complicated and has all it's features would be welcome.

First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?

The AnimeBytes outage from yesterday was because of this, DNS registrar seems to have gone down with all it's .tv domains, and this has taken down lots of sites

Well shit...

Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

For the interested, here's the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account