Normal, plug and play mice last a long time, with or without firmware updates, which are typically free. I guarantee that nobody will buy this mouse, and if it does release it will stop receiving updates within six months.

I've switched to FreeTube for now, it still works using the Invidious API. This is happening because YouTube is testing forced login to watch videos or use the API. There is a workaround it seems, but we'll have to wait for all the major clients to roll it out.

Personally, I've had no problems whatsoever running the Office 365 apps needed by my school on Debian's version of Firefox ESR. Aside from Outlook and Teams, I'm not asked to use them very often, as most assignments are turned in as PDFs, but when I have been required to use Word and Excel, I have had no problems.

Apparently GNOME 46 introduced support for Microsoft 365 accounts including OneDrive support in the file manager, so a distro that runs a recent GNOME version, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, may be your best option. But without that, you can still use a third-party project like onedriver or abraunegg's OneDrive client.

It's very new. Previously the system would just drop to a console with a message saying "Kernel panic: not syncing: [reason]" and a whole bunch of debug info.

But still, on a well-maintained system, that pretty much never happens. Mainly because Linux is significantly more resilient to faults in device drivers than Windows.

It's not systemd's fault, though systemd most often implements offline updates. The arguments for and against offline updates have nothing to do with systemd.

A lot of Linux distros, and graphical package managers like Discover and GNOME Software, are moving in that direction, under the argument that updating while online can cause disruptions to running software, in the worst case including the package manager itself (which can brick the system if it occurs in the middle of a critical update), and updates can't be applied until the affected program (or the system, in case of critical components like the kernel) restarts anyway. Fedora Magazine explains the reasoning here: https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

In my personal experience though, I have never had an issue enabling automatic online updates on Debian Stable, and have had computers stay online for several months without any noticeable issues beyond Firefox restarting, so the risk is there but it's pretty minor.

For me, the outdated packages in stable have actually gotten better over time, as DEs get closer to a place where I don't need any major updates to enjoy using them, Flatpaks become more readily available, and on a subjective level, I get less and less invested in current Linux news. Before Debian became my "forever distro", I'd hopped to it a few times, and often found myself wishing for a newer piece of software that wasn't in backports or flathub, or simply being bored with how stable it is, but that's been happening less and less. And I feel like Debian 12 in particular left me with software that I wouldn't mind being stuck with for two years.

I've gotten warnings to upgrade my browser with Debian's Firefox ESR, but they never affected a website's usability in a way that a newer version would fix, and they do provide security updates and new ESR series when they come out; even if you must have the newest Firefox, you can use the Flatpak.

Additionally, I'm currently on testing in order to get better support for my GPU, and each time I've tried to use it, it's worked for me for a longer time than the last as I get better at resolving or avoiding broken packages. If you do experience issues like the one you described, and can replicate them, and no one else has already reported them, you should report them to Debian's bug tracker. The whole point of Testing is to find and squash all the critical bugs before the next stable releases.

Almost all distros can dual boot, so there's little reason to highlight one as being the best for it. Dual booting is a bit messy and risky no matter what you do, so back up your data first and, if you're new to Linux, look up instructions for dual booting Windows 11 and your chosen distro.

Only one I can think of that does anything special with dual boot, off the top of my head, is Q4OS, which offers a way to install it from within Windows using an app. (It also happens to be tailored towards people familiar with Windows XP or 7, so it should be a somewhat smooth transition for a first time Linux user.) I haven't tried this myself, but I imagine it just expedites the usual steps of dual booting: shrink the Windows partition, then install into the resulting free space (or to an unused disk).

If that doesn't sound appealing, just try any distro recommended as "beginner friendly", like Linux Mint. Tutorials should be easy to find.

I loved the default theme, the splash screen, all of the customization options, and how lightweight it was, but it's missing some of the conveniences and polish of GNOME, KDE, or even LXQt and Xfce. Using an independent toolkit meant that none of my apps looked consistent, even after trying my best to find a theme that supported everything, and if I explored the settings beyond a surface level things started looking ancient and clunky.

Definitely underrated, and really impressive for how much they could pack into a desktop targeted at older PCs, but still missing quite a bit.

A collection of poker scenes filmed from different camera angles.

It's a good thing that KDE 6 is coming out soon because holy cow, that's a big secondary version number.

Revolt is the most Discord-like FOSS chat app; it's very easy to use and customizable. Rocket.chat and Mattermost do similar things and are more oriented toward organizations (the Slack/Teams Classic use case).

Yes and no. X11 is the old window system for Linux (and most Unixes), but it was very much not designed with security in mind, and has become difficult to maintain to the point that the only new updates made to it are to help with Wayland backwards-compatibility. Wayland is its de facto successor, and most new Linux desktop development is based on Wayland rather than X11.