Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.
For what it's worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.
You could try the booting the live CD and see if you're able to get the graphics working more easily. And I've never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what's up there.
I'm not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.
I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.
Seems a lot of futo fans were advocating that it was "open-source" because the code is available while ignoring that an essential part of something being consider open-source is that the source is licensed openly as well as being viewable openly.
I use NFS shares for all of my volumes so they're more portable for future expansion and easier to back up. It uses additional disk space for the cache of course, but i have plenty.
When I add a second server or add a dedicated storage device as I expand, it has made it easier to move with almost no effort.
Also Canonical has added a lot of problems to promote their monetization strategies lately. Mostly aimed at business rather than regular users, but still causes problems for home users.
I generally prefer RHEL based distros over Debian based ones, so Rocky Linux for servers is my current go to and Fedora for desktop, though Fedora is heading in a similar direction as Ubuntu I feel...
Yeah, probably best bet is to uninstall and purge settings. Depending on the district you're using and it's package manager, you it may be as simple as apt purge vim. And just to be sure remove all vimrc files from all user home folders including root.
Yeah, they now no longer censor things like saying that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill or that women are "household objects" or that all immigrants are criminals (regardless of immigration status). So, yes they stopped censoring hate-speech that far right people don't consider hate speech because they consider those things as accepted facts.
This issue is more likely about the perception that anyone with an interest in technology is a cyber criminal. Same reason that the Bush administration's NSA flagged subscribers to the Liinux forums. Knowledge is power and they believe anyone who wants knowledge is a threat to their power. They'd prefer to go back to the dark ages and die of dysentery than accept women as equal, gay people as human, or brown people as neighbors (which is even more ironic when coming from other brown people).
There's some concern now that Startpage is majority owned by an ad company. The company says they want the ad revenue rather than the user data, but it's hard to trust that. I used to use it but moved to Searxng.
I'd love to see your implementation specs, code, pr any other technical details you'd like to share. I'm setting up home assistant and one of the things I want it to do is replace the functions of my thermostat and add some additional details.
I used to have a Nest Thermostat, but my furnace needed to be replaced a couple of months back and I got a Mitsubishi heat pump, but their thermostat sucks, and it isnt compatible with Nest because it's all wireless. I installed the WiFi add-on to the furnace so I can use the app, too, but it also sucks pretty bad. Plus I miss the functionality of it turning down the heat when I'm away to save money and turning it back on before I get home.
So I'm planning to implement my own solution and documenting and open sourcing everything. But it's going to be several months before I get to doing it due to other more urgent projects. So, I'm looking at everything available. I definitely will be setting up a small display to replace the thermostat and having motion detectors to turn on the display when you approach it to see the temperature and such and to supplement the home/away detection.
Anyway, I would love to see your implementation to see how you did this piece of it.
Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.