I like this, because I'm on a slow line here in Greece, and pretty much every time there's an update, the linux-firmware package is 600 MB, which is massive to download.
I have tried to get... addicted to this short form video thing (through IG reels, and Youtube shorts, I don't have tiktok), without success. I just don't see what people find in it. Sure, it's fun for about 5 minutes, no more than that. I use IG to follow my favorite artists only, and youtube for recipes, philosophical conversations, NDE reports, and other metaphysical stuff. I can't stand people dancing or AI cats baking bread.
If you want to do a tiny bit more stuff, like subtitles and blurring, you MUST use a full video editor, like Shotcut and Kdenlive. These features aren't simple to implement so they're part of a full editing experience.
I use the cli on macos often, because some apps need to be manually signed from the terminal. Power users on windows also use the terminal. However, the best of what you ask is Linux Mint.
Linux Mint is not a "rando ubuntu fork". It's the most reliable OS for me, along Debian-Stable. It has prefs for almost everything, sane defaults, and a clear release and support schedule. And it uses Cinnamon. I've tried everything under the sun, I always come back to Mint. It works.
This looks like either a driver issue, but more likely, a hardware issue. Either your nvme, or your RAM, is faulty. Run memcheck (it's a bootable thing you run to make sure your ram is ok), and I'm sure there are tests for ssds too.
Guess what, I never created an account. I just can't get into that quick content, I find it boring after 5 minutes, without substance. I tried both youtube shorts and instagram reels, boring! I prefer long talks or analysis on youtube.
No KDE for new users, it's way too convoluted and bloated ui-wise. It also uses lots of ram, more than cinnamon. XFce is indeed much lighter than either, but it doesn't have enough desktop preference panels like Cinnamon does (e.g. printer panel).
I don't think so, it's just $33 to buy it outright (no subscription). You can't buy a good scanner or a printer for $33. It's a good value for money, especially since the guy has to buy (and most importantly) test all that hardware for each release. It's a lot of engineering time. But as I said, he probably forgot to add watermarking to the scanning stitching feature, so no purchase was necessary for me. The demo version is good enough for it!
I use gimp to edit (clean up) my scanned watercolor paintings. Yes, gimp is good enough now for what I used to do with photoshop: adjustment layers, more sane ui. Only thing that was missing is a very obscure feature that photoshop has, to merge multiple scanned pages of a very large photo. I now use vuescan for that (the free version does not add a watermark when using that particular feature, unlike its scans!). And then I edit in gimp, or RapidRAW (a new, lightroom-like app, that's easier to use than darktable). So I'm set.
This is how I do it:
Scan with the official EpsonScan2 app form flatpak as TIFF (unfortunately their .deb file coredumps on Linux Mint). The XSane app unfortunately is too buggy.
Then I merge the various scans to a single scan (if my painting was too large and needed several passes), with the free version of VueScan. There is one other foss app that can do that, but it's so convoluted that it's not even funny. Vuescan does it with a single click and it doesn't add a watermark, curiously enough!
Then I edit either in Gimp to fix the wrong scanned colors (this epson scanner moves oranges to red a bit), or fix mistakes (that's common now even for traditional illustrators). If it's only colors I need to fix and not change actual parts of the painting, I might just use RapidRAW.
Then I export at 1024px high for web usage, as a jpg 90% quality. I then archive the TIFFs and XCF files.
I like this, because I'm on a slow line here in Greece, and pretty much every time there's an update, the linux-firmware package is 600 MB, which is massive to download.