Overall I think this is well written. I agree with @poVoq@slrpnk.net that the section on picking an instance could be improved, since which instance one picks can be rather important, since federation/defederation is dictated by individual instances.

And a minor typo I noticed:

leaving Mastodon out to try

I assume that should be “out to dry”.

That sucks man. You went the extra mile to be a good host, so you should be proud of that, regardless!

Is it “fair”? I’d say no, but the world isn’t a fair place. Enormous, unscrupulous corporations are to blame for the untenable situation we collectively find ourselves in. And those corporations aren’t going to be rectifying their behavior any time soon unless forced to.

That being said, asking individuals to take steps to reduce climate change isn’t an unreasonable thing in my eyes. Because, until corporations are held accountable, asking individuals is the only thing that can possibly improve the situation. Even though it’s like throwing a cup of water on a forest fire.

The second that Amazon, Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coke, Pepsi, et al are forced to do their part, I will start throwing my trash out the window again like a proper American. Until then, I’m gonna recycle and encourage my friends and family to do so as well.

The official documentation has some guides on setting it up in a few different ways, although they assume the user is decently familiar with Linux/terminal commands and such. There might be some more beginner-friendly guides out there, though.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container/

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin a while back and I’ve been very happy with it.

Depends on the particular device. LDAC has been around for years and supports higher bitrates than mp3s (assuming we’re putting 320kbps mp3s in the “higher quality” category)

Ah, darn. Unfortunately I have no additional help to offer since that particular issue was fixed for me after changing those options in Flatseal.

I’d try running Firefox from the terminal to see what error message you’re receiving when the crashes occur; the unique error message was what led me to this workaround when I was originally troubleshooting.

In Bazzite, you should just need to open the Discover package manager and click “Refresh” and then “Update All” in the top right. Although these drivers don’t appear to be available through the package manager yet; mine is still on version 560.31.02.

If your Firefox crashes are anything like mine were, it should be solved by opening up Flatseal and disabling Wayland rendering for Firefox. See the screenshot shown here: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/nvidia-555-drivers-incoming-important-information/2554

When I first installed Bazzite on my Intel+Nvidia laptop, the Firefox crashes were constant. The workaround here fixed the issue for me.

I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”

I’m no legal expert; I assume support can be either offered or completely avoided depending on the shop owner’s preference. Most Linux distributions come with a “this software is free (as in freedom) and comes with no warranty or guaranteed functionality” disclaimer.

If I wanted to engage more with my clients and build more trust, I might offer some degree of troubleshooting/support for the Linux machines I sold. But I don’t think I’d be under any legal obligation to offer that service just for selling the laptops.

Whether or not the computer shop offers support might affect whether or not a customer wants to shop at my store. Maybe I can sell my laptops cheaper if I don’t offer support, or maybe my laptops cost a bit more because I do offer aftermarket support.

how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop

It kinda depends on each individuals’ use case; there’s lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.

Any given laptop I’m staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I’d default to Mint.

If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.

If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.

Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.

Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.

So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they’ve never used Linux before).

Linux (or is called unix?)

Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called “Unix”. Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the “POSIX” standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).

If I’ve gotten any of this information incorrect, please don’t tell Richard Stallman.

lol, I feel you there. I got a ruggedized, waterproof USB stick about 6 years ago to keep on my keychain and I’ve used it maybe three times ever. Though I’ve also been working from home for the last 4+ years so, y’know, less opportunities to use it in general.

Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, though.

6.06 “Dapper Drake” (iirc) was my first GNU/Linux distro back in the day. I was about 15 and spent a week tinkering with it trying to get the wifi to work on my old HP Pavilion.

Good times.