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.

Some people might dismiss Rust as being “unelegant” or “ugly”, but the verbosity actually serves a good purpose and is immensely helpful for building large-scale applications:

Here rust is trying to be unambiguous by forcing you to write just enough context when needed. It is not unnecessarily verbose at all and is not trying to be absolutely explicit about everything. When there could be more ambiguity, rust errs on the side of being more explicit which increases the verbosity. But when it is less ambiguous then it favors being less explicit. Hence why you can omit types and lifetimes in most situations but require them when it is not obvious what they should be.

That is a rate limit. That user was probably abusing something and trying to scrape github and got hit by a rate limit. Or someone in their house/flat/building did. There is just not enough in that post to tell what the hell is going on and it is far too early to jump to the concluding that github has done something wrong here.

They might have lowered the rate limits, they might not have. I doubt the lowered it to 3. Something else is very likely going on. We have to stop jumping to the worst conclusion anytime anything happens and imminently knee jerk reacting to that idea. We can wait for more information to come through and see what the actual issue is before assuming the worst.

The devs from ΔV: Rings of Saturn give a completely different story. Yeah, most bug reports come from Linux - but platform specific ones a vanishingly rare: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/

Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

Not to mention the quality of the reports from the Linux users was vastly more details and useful to them.

They only need it to pass once, we need it to be rejected every single time.

I dont think multiple streaming platforms is a problem. The problem is exclusivity. I dont want to pay for every subscription service to watch popular things. I want to watch any show I want on one platform that I choose. Much like I do for music. But no, with TV shows everyone has their own walled garden of exclusives. Fuck that.

Ubuntu is a fork of unstable Debian packages. You don’t want unstable on your server!

Unstable does not mean crashes all the time. What makes them unstable on Debian is they can change and break API completely. But guess what, Ubuntu freezes the versions for their release and maintains their own security patches, completely mitigating that issue.

There are other reasons you might not want to use Ubuntu on a server but package version stability is not one of them.

Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.

I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don't think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.

Not surprising since car manufacturers lobbied to get them classed as light trucks to dodge the stricter emissions and safety regulations that apply to general cars. Then marketed the hell out of them as there is more profit to be made due to them not needing to comply with as many regulations. And now they are everywhere and are way worst than cars in almost every way.

Funny how yet again the capitalist class chooses profits over any other metric leading to s shittier world overall. Almost like there is a pattern happening in every industry...

Almost like having companies track everything you do is not a good idea and easily raises many false flags that are hard to correct.

This is a bad response to this news. There are many reasons why you might want to run tor on Windows and gatekeeping people out of tor because they are not on a chosen OS is a terribly way to get more people into thinking about privacy and security practices. Yes if you have the highest threat model you might want to avoid Windows as well, but not everyone needs absolute privacy/security for what they do. But why should you not have access to a tool that can help improve things even if you are not able to switch everything to a more private/secure alternative?

Really you should want everyone and anyone to run on tor, even if they don't need it, even if they are on windows. The more people using it the more secure it is for those that do require it.