Strange! I quite like Ventoy, but I was a bit cautious to recommend it originally - I've seen some distros just flat out not work with it (I just picked up an old Thinkpad and Bluefin would not work via Ventoy for example), and while I assumed Mint would probably work, I couldn't be sure.

I'll definitely remember that for the next time I see someone installing Mint though, so I appreciate you letting me know what fixed it!

Hmm, that's quite an interesting one. The:

Failed to start MokManager: Not Found

Leads me to believe that this is indeed something Secure Boot related (or rather, the system looking for files related to secure boot that aren't being found). Given that you were able to boot it initially, and then it stopped after booting back into Windows, I suspect some shenanigans here possibly from Windows. When you were freeing up disk space, did you use Windows' partition manager (I think its just called "Disk Management") at all and modify any partitions?

Just to confirm, is it just Mint that doesn't boot, or does Windows also not boot? One of the nicer things about UEFI is how you can have multiple boot loaders installed, where as back in the (regular) BIOS days with MBR, only one boot loader could be installed.

That is all to say, try entering your PC's boot menu (so the same menu you initially used to boot the Mint USB), you should have multiple boot options from your PC's drive - though Windows' boot loader usually identifies itself as "Windows Boot Manager". If you choose that option (or if its not "clickable", you should be able to switch the order so that its first - then reboot normally), does it at least boot back into Windows?

Not really a fan of the author's attitude at the start (I'm not quite sure how I'd describe it, but it certainly feels off...) - however I do agree with the premise. Even if Microsoft stops allowing kernel level anti-cheat to happen (and honestly I'll believe it when I see it), that doesn't mean that game developers/publishers who are hostile to Linux players are suddenly going to go "Oh! Well in that case..."

I'd be incredibly happy to be wrong in this case, but as of how the current landscape is, I just don't see it changing. They'll just find some other BS reason to exclude Linux players.

I stopped purchasing games that weren't compatible with Linux long ago, and the one holdover I had was Destiny 2 - but the game's major story has come to an end, which makes it a great time for me to drop it too.

SteamOS before 3.0 was based on Debian, but with 3.0 they decided to move away from Debian and now use (immutable) Arch.

It uses the Marian library via WASM (their wrapper for this is here) to do translations, which AFAICT is "AI" based (which I presume knocks the file size down quite a bit) - additionally, the language packs (I'm not sure what term to use here so I'll just go with that) are not all bundled with Firefox, they're downloaded when you first use them.

The previous incarnation of it, the Firefox extension's repo was found over here - I assume the code is now within Firefox's main repo since its built into Firefox now.

Does Chrome's run locally on the machine, or does it ferry it over to Google Translate?

Firefox's is done locally, it is not cloud based.

It disables the forced update requirement for the Discord client.

This isn't a problem of Lemmy itself in terms of the software, so I'm not sure it qualifies... But, I find that Lemmy still has the same problem of Reddit where if you say something that the majority of users disagree with, prepare to be torn apart in the comments. And I do not just mean by getting corrected on something you said being factually incorrect, I mean more of a "your opinion is wrong because..."

For example, any discussion revolving around Linux (and let me just prepend this by saying I am a Linux user), if you happen to prefer using Windows be prepared to be told all of the reasons why you have to use Linux instead. And that's usually tame compared to what I've seen on other subjects.

Obviously there are cases where yeah, you absolutely deserve to be torn a new one in the extreme cases when someone is actually being truly vile, such as trying to advocate for the harm of someone/a group of people - but the "extremes" are not what I'm really referring to here.

I've blocked a lot of users that while I've had no interaction with them, I see how they are clearly engaging in, let's just say, bad faith with others.

In terms of software-specific issues, I can't say that I really have had a lot of problems with Lemmy itself as of recently. As an instance owner, I used to have a lot of weird (what seemingly appeared to be, at least) random federation issues, but I haven't seen any federation problems in a while now. Though just today I swear I submitted a comment somewhere, and its just poof not there - not even locally, but I'm chalking that one up to something I've done (whether a misclick, or I'm just hallucinating as badly as an LLM) rather than an actual issue.

I haven't had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I'm a bit confused here:

Valve isn't obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple's reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.

Then the next sentence:

There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven't used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?

I guess the best way that I'd word it is, Lemmy (and the Fediverse at whole) is run by people - not a for-profit company.

Also, having decent mobile apps again is very nice.

Also, IRC doesn't constantly try to throw "upgrades" (Nitro) in your face every single moment that it gets.

Yep, it's a test instance. There's a couple of other ones as well, https://voyager.lemmy.ml and https://ds9.lemmy.ml