Like the title says, my partner's laptop was still running Windows 10 and they got infected with a backdoor malware. We'll need to reset her computer. It's an Asus Tuf Gaming A15.

She's been using Windows 10 for as long as she could but support is running out. At her work the computers are on Windows 11 and she hates it. Plus she's fervently anti-AI and wants none of that forced Copilot bullshit and privacy eroding features of Windows 11. She's seen me use it for over a year now and I also installed it on our old OG 1st gen MS Surface Pro table and she sees how well it's going. So now she wants Linux on her laptop.

After careful consideration and comparisons, I've decided to go with Zorin OS. I thought of Linux Mint, but it just looks so dated. There are inconistencies in the looks and I feel it lacks some features that I found that Zorin OS has. (It's essentially Gnome with QoL extras.) My only concern is that Zorin has Snaps out of the box but I don't think that's a concern for her. I'll install it on a BTRFS partition with automatic snapshots and grub-btrfs to recover from snapshots. And I'll schedule monthly backups of her files through rsync, or whatever the built-in backup tool does, onto an external drive.

I've tried Zorin on a VM and it was already outstanding. On the live USB session it was able to detect her NVidia card and recommend either the nouveau or NVidia proprietary driver. Everything worked out of the box. So I'm fairly confident everything will work well. One concern I have is she uses her personal laptop for work, and needs to connect to her work's Microsoft account. I see there's an accounts section in the settings where this can be set up, but I've never used it, so that'll be a first. Her work also requires Cisco AnyConnect VPN client. There is a Linux client, but you need a Cisco account to download it, and her work IT department does not support Linux, so I don't know if she'll be able to get it. One of the IT people has Linux on his machine and was able to set it up so maybe we'll rely on him for that part. She'll also need MS Office which uses a work license. I wonder how that will work on Bottles. We can try with Libre Office but I know the spacing and fonts get all wonky when you open a MS Word document or a Powerpoint presentation. Every other app she uses is open source apps like Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, etc. And she doesn't game much, but I know this will work just fine. And the Gnome-Network-Displays will allow her to cast her screen onto our NVidia Shield device for watching movies.

Is there anything else I should be concerned about? Maybe hardware wise? Or anything to so with Snaps that could cause issues?

I came across this older article from 2020 and I found it informative. It's about how the shell does globbing and the potential issues it can cause if not understood correctly.

TLDR:

find . -not -name *.py -delete and find . -not -name '*.py' -delete will behave differently in certain scenarios.

In the first example, the shell will replace the wildcard pattern with a list of matching file names IF there are any matches in the current directory. If there isn't, then it won't do anything and will pass *.py to find.

In the second example, the shell won't do any globbing at all and will just pass *.py

I switched from Linux Mint to Kubuntu, how do I get Pix (the image viewer) on Kubuntu (I know that Gwenview exists, but I prefer Pix) I couldn't find it in Discover or a .deb package.

kew 4.1 adds:

• Cross-fade (both on-demand and automatic).
• More cool visualizer modes (press v).
• Auto-resume.
• Custom layouts.

More info here:

• https://github.com/ravachol/kew
• https://codeberg.org/ravachol/kew

https://github.com/diinki/linux-antiquity/tree/main

Summary

• The Linux Foundation, joined by leading organizations, today announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software.
• Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
• Founding members commit engineering talent, security expertise and funding to harden the shared open source software that banks, hospitals, power grids, telecoms, governments, and AI labs depend on.
• Organizations that contribute engineering resources or funding to the security of critical open source are invited to participate and can learn more at https://akrites.org/.