It's been years since I've seen that written anywhere

Last time I ever saw an RTFM was when someone has gone into something that's way over their head to a point where it would have taken weeks to guide them to even get the relevant info to guide them what they need to do

Unsurprisingly, it's one of those distros with a "Pro" subscription tier

I think im about the closest thing to a fanboi for the distro and even im like. whats with all these articles about their new version being posted in the last week or so.

They have doubled their users, they're now in the double digits. It's cause for celebration.

I do think ai tools can be really good for this! They often do a good job of explaining why to do things and allowing for follow-up questions, rather than just what to do, and what the manual says.

The one thing to be careful of is that they also sometimes give those outdated or unnecessary answers, just like the web does. It's worth asking the same thing a few times and maybe doing a web search for their suggestions to double check (it can still be better than just trying to search through forums, stack overflow and archwiki yourself without knowing exactly what to search for and which things apply to you).

Sometimes beginners in Linux fall into rabbit holes following ai instructions or online tutorials that suggest huge complex things like manually compiling and repackaging broken dependencies or replacing your whole desktop environment to avoid a bug when there's a much simpler solution.

It's those kinds of pifalls that lead to the extreme reactions you sometimes see from people who claim Linux is too complicated or broken or unreliabile or not ready. People run into a small issue and google search or ai tells them how to use a gun and they shoot themselves in the foot with it.

Many distros have pretty comprehensive and up to date wikis (Arch and Debian for example). LLMs have a lot of out of date info as well, even the big proprietary ones. I can see how they might help a newcomer though, with how bad search engines are now (ironically, a lot of the problems are from AI generated articles SEO'd to hell).

I know how to do a lot of Linux maintenance, but with Mint I very rarely have to. And it seems to be just getting more stable with each release.

Yes halflife 3 is coming!

Don't! You're gonna jinx it!

The End is nigh!

It’s going to stop receiving security updates, making it risky to keep it connected to the internet.

It’s probably fine, but if you use the internet on it regularly you could get hacked, and if you want to run newer software on it, that will become a problem.

If you want to try a linux OS for it, I would strongly recommend Bazzite. I just started using it. It works quite well out of the box, and is specifically designed for running windows games on Linux as smoothly as possible.

Depends how much banking you do on it

Not really tbh. It's almost certainly behind a firewall so the main threat would be vulnerabilities in browsers.

As long as they still get updates, you should be mostly good.

This is kinda problem from security perspective. It won't receive security patches (outside of EU).

Give Bazzite a try it’s been good for me