Automated backups happen at night.

No.

o5@TR5:~$ uptime
 19:59:08 up 55 days,  4:28,  4 users,  load average: 0.72, 0.72, 0.84

And non-commercial distros?

Honestly, I think Kubuntu is slept on as a beginner’s distro.

Yes, Ubuntu has its issues … but those sorts of issues are really not going to affect a newbie much. And it’s stable, easy to use, KDE defaults will be pretty familiar-feeling for Windows refugees, and it should be relatively easy to find help – 90% of the time, if you just type “how do I _____ in Linux?” into Google Duck Duck Go, the results you find will be perfectly applicable to Ubuntu. Want to install 3rd party software that’s not in their repos? In pretty much any software that offers a Linux version, the Ubuntu-compatible install method is the first one they list.

(Oh, and the installer is literally one click if you just let it do everything in automatic mode. No keyboard needed. The install image boots into a full GUI installer with mouse support, and if you want, all you have to do is click ‘automatic install’ and wait. Once it’s done and reboots, you’re in your new OS.)

Once you become an advanced enough user that you get annoyed by Snap packages or feel like you need more cutting-edge package updates … well, then you should also be advanced enough to do your own distro-hopping.

That’s the tricky part, innit?

A few good options:

A) Set up your backup/restore procedures immediately after setting up your fresh new system. And then immediately test them to see if you can successfully restore, before you’ve done anything important on the new system that you can’t afford to lose. If the restoration completely fails, no biggie. You just have to start over on setting up your fresh new system.

B) Attempt to restore your backup to a different system, not your primary one. You’ll need a second set of hardware to do that, but if you’ve got the hardware lying around, it’s a great way to test your restore procedure. If you’re upgrading your hardware anyway, it could be a good time to do this test – use your backup restoration procedure to move your data to the new hardware. (As an extra bonus, this doesn’t require any downtime on the primary system.)

C) Simulate a complete hard drive failure and replacement by replacing your primary system’s drive(s) with a blank new one. If the backup restoration fails, you should (fingers crossed) be able to just plug the old hard drive back in and everything will go back to how it was before your test.

D) Have multiple backups and multiple restore plans, and just hope to fuck that at least one of them actually works during your testing.

Option A can only be done if you’re proactive about it and do it at the right time.

Options B and C require extra hardware, but are probably the best choice if you have the hardware or can afford it.

And Option D will always have at least a tiny amount of risk associated with it.

Do you know how to transfer the files back if your OS has completely failed?

Verifying the files are there in your backup is only, like 10% of verifying that it’s a real, usable backup.

The important question is: can you successfully restore those files from the backup? Can you successfully put them back where they’re supposed to be after losing your primary copy?

but I use it on Windows at work also.

Huh… And here I was, never even considering that somebody may have ported Kate to Windows. I should try it, for the rare instance I’m editing something on Windows!

when I want something I can paste into on the screen right now as Kate loads a little slowly

Fun fact I just learned recently: If you have text in your clipboard, you can paste that directly into the file manager (or the desktop background). It will prompt you for a filename, and then create a file with the pasted text in it.

If all you want to do is paste some text, you can actually do that without using any text editor at all.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen.

Yeah … about that…

As long as X11 still works and does what I want it to, I’ll keep using it.

(And hopefully, by the time I’m dragged to a new system, kicking and screaming the whole way, Wayland will be fully mature and complete and it will be a painless transition.)

At some point, though, you have to come to terms with the power usage.

One or two modern machines could do everything a dozen shitty old ones do (even if you have to emulates some of them as VMs), and with a lot less power usage than running a dozen shitty old computers.

Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.

(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)

What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.