Using sudo when it isn't necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su.. Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files... and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental "sudo rm -rf /" command.
Seriously... sudo is not a "habit" to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.
You do seem confused though... Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system... the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and "break" as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.
But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.
Mint is a fine distro... but if you don't like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater... the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.
It is amazing how much you can learn when the only way to get OpenOffice working is to troubleshoot outdated C syntax errors in the output generated while compiling with clang. Time solves even the most abstruse problems, whether you planned for it or not.
The book you're describing is most likely "The Shadows Between Us" by Tricia Levenseller.
Here's why it matches your description:
Island Nation in the South: The story begins on the island of Iolara, a tropical island with a strict code of conduct called the "Way."
Discipline and Quest to the North: The protagonist, Alessandra, is being punished for practicing magic, which is forbidden. She joins a group on a quest to the tyrannical Empire of Aethel in the north.
Crown Prince with Magic and Internal Struggle: One of the main characters, Kallias, is revealed to be the crown prince of Aethel. He possesses forbidden magic that manifests as dark veins and threatens to consume him if he uses it too much.
Abandoned City, Temple, and Possession: The group ventures into the ruined city of Aethel's former capital and break into a temple. There they encounter the Shadow Queen, an ancient deity who temporarily possesses one of the characters.
Evil Palace and Power Struggle: The climax takes place in the Obsidian Palace, carved into a mountain, where Kallias faces betrayal and assassination attempts from his siblings vying for the throne.
Although some minor details might not perfectly align with your exact memory, the core plot points you mentioned strongly suggest "The Shadows Between Us" is the book you're looking for.
Bullshit. That is like saying adding more lanes to a freeway will reduce traffic congestion... it just encourages more deforestation.
If the fertility in a rainforest is in the biomass, learning to live with that biomass in place will be necessary if people are to live there. But there were very few people there before people started their land grab.. it may not be possible even when the biomass is restored.
If the rainforest is valued for the ecological impact it has, then it is more likely that people will have to move out. Not attractive to the people who already moved in, but when they are starving then they will eventually migrate away anyway, and keeping them there with false promises to make cleared land usable will only make things worse.
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
tl;dr ... it is the web page you are trying to copy from... and the operating system touch screen support... not the browser. You outta luck here... use a different OS or copy from a different web page.
Functions don't return... equals goto.
Everything must be done by side effects... all variables are global.
Global state mutation is inheritance... no grok.
Every call is non-blocking and spawns a new thread... atomic bomb for junior software engineers.
??? ... shorting the stock of the company that adopts this.
FWIW I have been running with a whitelist for about 15 years. Kind of a calm feeling to enter a new site every couple of weeks and ignore the busy scripts by default. To each their own.
There are two wrong sides here... so it can be difficult to predict what anyone will lean further away from. Beware of assuming that means they are leaning toward the other side though.
Jesus. The initial transient used to be about 3%, but now is under 1% for most product being sold. It was never near 20%.
But that doesn't stop idiots from saying "we have optimizers" and installing them in the shade or facing north and acting surprised when they underperform.
Way too late for that. Every language I know makes some kind of auto conversion for numeric comparisons... and sometimes for strings as well.