I agree with others that the source article is using a click-bait title convention unnecessarily, but I disagree that the tool is bloatware.
I use tmux and vim for the vast majority of my daily tasks, and I still recognize the benefit of having GUI options for others.
I'll never understand why some in our community show so much disdain for software contributions made by voluneers simply because it doesn't directly benefit them.
USB tethering should work fine as well if the firmware isn't on the netinst media.
For the boot times, simply pressing the Esc key should drop you into text mode. From there, it should be pretty obvious where it's hanging in the boot cycle.
Honestly mate, it sounds like you've done a number of customizations, tweaks, and package changes, some of which you didn't document and now cannot recall.
The easiest and cleanest solution is to drop-in your much faster SSD and perform a fresh installation. If you run into any post-install issues, you'll at least have a clean system to troubleshoot. And the performance difference will be night and day.
Try not to get hung up on having LibreOffice around. It's just an application. The reality is there are likely hundreds of binary files on your system that you'll never use. And you might even find it handy some day if you're without internet and need to work on a document or spreadsheet.
As for the old 1TB drive, you could purchase a USB drive enclosure and use it as an external drive for storage or backups if you don't already have a solution for that.
Edit: As of Bookworm's release, firmware is now provided by the non-free-firmware repo, enabled by default and included on the official installation media. It might not be included on the netinst media though, so if you need wifi during setup I would stick to the standard ISOs.
I've never had a use for Linux Mint myself, but I'm still happy to see them cut out the middle man and base it directly off of Debian. Hopefully being closer to the source will result in even more upstream contributions.
If it works at all, you shouldn't have any other issues. For example, Intel NUCs have a stated maximum amount of memory, but there are plenty of online discussions about running higher amounts without issue.
It definitely has its merits on certain types of discussion, but generally I sort comments by Top. I do sort my subscribed communities by New though, just to keep the topics fresh.
I have a couple of Pis, but currently only using the Pi 4 which is my Kodi box (LibreELEC). I planned to use my older Pi 3B as a web server, but I also have Proxmox on a NUC running as my main home server, so I don't know if there's any advantage to using the Pi at this point.
Thanks for the tip, I swapped the image. I initially tried using the animated version of the first image, as it demonstrated the behaviour nicely, but Lemmy kept throwing JSON errors.
I'm sure there are more elegant solutions out there, but here's my method:
I have an inexpensive hard drive dock connected to my NUC home server via USB (with UASP support). I rotate two large-capacity hard drives between work and home, ensuring that one is always off-site. The drives are wholly encrypted, so I manually decrypt and mount the drive, and run a backup script that pulls any changed data from all devices on the network. I then take that drive to work and bring the other one home.
I have a calendar reminder to do this each month, and I'll sometimes run a backup in between the usual schedule when we're working on important projects at home.
I can't help but wonder if it's only backwards to us because of our learned behaviour. The more I use it, and bounce between the two styles, the more logical it begins to feel. Definitely a paradigm shift.
I agree with others that the source article is using a click-bait title convention unnecessarily, but I disagree that the tool is bloatware.
I use tmux and vim for the vast majority of my daily tasks, and I still recognize the benefit of having GUI options for others.
I'll never understand why some in our community show so much disdain for software contributions made by voluneers simply because it doesn't directly benefit them.