You would be surprised. A lot are written by people as part of their job or so they can use them for their job or being sponsored by a company to do the work. The people with the most time to contribute library code to rust are being paid to do it in one form or another.

Passwords can be secure when the end user picks a strong one. But that is the biggest problem with them, the end user. They don't pick good passwords and decades have shown us the general public are bad at passwords.

Passkeys are not biometrics. They are much simpler. In a very simple way you can think of them as a secure long random password that is stored on you device, generated per device, and not sent over the wire to the other side (so more like public/private key cryptography I believe).

The passkey on your device can be stored in an encrypted vault or even secure hardware that requires a pin/password or key to unlock.

They are not getting rid of multifactor codes and can be used with them. But by protecting them locally you can still have 2 factors to access them - the hardware/vault that contains them and the pin/password/biometric that unlocks the vault. And that is in addition to server side multifactor systems.

But even without all that you still gain massive benefits over passwords as it stops cross site comprises when one sites gets their password database leaked. Or brute forcing access to systems by guessing weak passwords that most people use.

I don’t have a second internal drive, so I’ll probably use an external hard drive or cloud storage.

Best to get both. Two copies of the data is better then one. Ideally have three. One being remote is also a plus as that will protect you in case your house burns down or something else drastic.

1.What’s the best way to back up and restore my data safely while preserving all metadata?

There is no real best way. Loads of things can be used to achieve the same purpose. But there are two main end goals: either copy/sync the data with a tool that can preserve timestamps or use a tool that can archive the data into a single file (that can optionally be compressed - like zip). Or for cloud providers they typically have their own tools that can do the syncing for you and will typically preserve timestamps by default. Just find one with a sync tool that also works on Linux.

There are loads of backup tools for windows that can do these things - though you should use one that does not use its own propriety format but instead something more open that can be read from the Linux side. I don't use windows these days so cannot advice on what the best tools here are.

Otherwise you can do this from a Linux Live USB using Linux based tools. If you are fine with the CLI then a simple way is to just mount the drives and use the rsync cli utility to sync the data you want across. rsync also lets you cancel and resume the sync which can be handy for larger directories. Or use the archiving tool tar to create a archive of the data on the other drive (this can be optionally compress). You should be able to use the filemanager to create archives as well which might make things a bit easier and should preserve timestamps - but just copying the data in a filemanager I don't think tends to preserve timestamps though so best to use the CLI for that or a dedicated tool.

What ever you decide to do test it on a small folder first and see if it does what you expect/want it to before committing to copying large amounts of data.

3.How can I access or use files that are only supported by Windows once I’ve switched to Linux? Are there workarounds or compatibility layers?

This depends on the file formats you care about. Some things are already supported by native Linux programs, others are not. Some windows only programs can work in compatibility tools like WINE - but I would only do that as a last resort. Personally I would figure this out before you reinstall your system. Start by finding Linux friendly programs for the files you need to use and see if they work with the files you want - if not try converting them before switching. Most Linux programs can also run on Windows so it is best to find these alternative and test them out before wiping your windows install. You can also boot up a Live USB and check things that way before committing to a install and wiping your system.

You can also (in addition to backing things up properly) buy a new SSD for your laptop and swap them around - keeping the original install in place in case there is something you forgot or need to switch back to access some old program you didn't think about.

They were a beneficial strategy. They made Trump and his buddies massive amounts of money from manipulating the stock market. They were even bragging about it after the fact.

Oh, you meant for the country and its people... Nah, that was never the point. If they were thought out at all it was only how it benefits Trump and his buddies.

That argument falls apart because state schools exist and 93% of children already attend. Which means private schools are not very popular despite their tax exempt status. So it is not encouraging many people to attend them and it is not like not going to a private school is not investing in your child's education since a free alternative that is not a complete shit hole exists. Turns out well funded public services can be a good thing and we don't need to privatize everything to see the best results.

In reality this seems more like a tax on rich parents who are the only ones that can afford expensive private schools in the first place all to hopefully better fund the free for everyone else state schools that most people already use.

Generally speaking you shouldn't be poking around running containers. It is rare that I have ever needed to do that. If you want to inspect the contents of an image then tools like dive are helpful. If the container produces some useful output that you might need then put that into a volume, you can then mount that volume to a debug/inspect container to read the files without messing around with the rest of the container.

Shell-less containers are a great security feature - it is extremely hard to get a reverse shell on something that does not have any shell. And if you must have a shell to debug something docker already has a feature for that docker debug which works for shell-less containers as well.

But is Rust merely a new face on Ada?

They share some features. But what language does not share any features with any other language? Any new language these days will be heavily inspired by and take features from other languages while making changes to or pulling in features from other places to create a mix that is unique to that new language. Rust is far more than just its GCless memory safety features and I am not even sure if they are inspired by ada or were just arrived at a similar solution to ada - they are not exactly a one to one matching with how ada does anything. If anything I believe that rust is much more heavily inspired by ocaml than ada.

The only time I see a rebase fail is due to a conflict. Which can be aborted with git rebase --abort no need for reflogs unless you really mess things up.

It is also added cost, added weight and complexity. It is only a good idea when those factors are outweighed by the benefits it brings - which is increased range? Or would it be better to put those solar pannels in stations alongside the road where trucks can go and charge up again? Then you can better place the panels to make more effective use of the sun rather than only having maybe half of the facing the sun at a time.

There are trade offs to everything and even if it is just wasted space does not make it a viable solution. We have seen foolish tests before - like the various companies trying to put solar panels under roads which has been a utter failure every single time they have tried - expensive, less efficient, and quickly needs to be replaced due t all the ware. Vs doing the saner thing and putting them above the traffic or in car park roofs... At least this idea has more merit then that. But still worth asking the question as to if it is the best use of resources.

Don't you have to be using it? Or at least plan to in the near future? Or else people would just register trademarks for everything just to squat on them and sell them at a premium later on.

Probably nearer 0%. These stats are from browser user agents on select sites. The chances that large amount of people are visiting these on their steam deck will likely not be very high. And there is only like 0.5% of people using the steamdeck on steam ATM.

The Steam Hardware Survey puts Linux at 1.44% (though gaming is heavily skewed towards windows users). And 0.57% using the AMD VANGOGH graphics card (which is apparently what the steam deck uses).

Honestly, if there is any data on the disk you cannot afford to lose then power it off and take it to a professional recovery service. The more you try to do to a failing drive the lower the chances of recovering data or the less data can be recovered from a drive. So, if you really care about the data just pay for someone that knows what they are doing and that has the tools to recover the data for you.

But... if you don't care or the data is not worth the cost of recovery. Then the first things I would run a S.M.A.R.T. report with smartctl and see what that says. This should give you an indication of if the drive if going bad or not. Though even if it passes it might still be going bad.

You can also use tools like ddrescue to create a backup of the drive copying as many blocks as it can even if some of them fail the first time (before it goes back to retry bad sectors). Though be warned, even reading from a failing drive can cause it to fail faster, seek a professional if you care about the data on it.

As for recovering data from it - if you are lucky you might just need to recover the partition table and ahve acess to things again. Though likely more than the partition table is bad on an old failing disk. You can use tools like photorec to recover files (more than just images that is) on the disk. Though with tools like this you lose all folder structure and there is no guarantee it will recover everything or even anything.

Then even if the S.M.A.R.T. report looks good you might want to run badblocks over the drive to try and detect any bad areas of the disk. A S.M.A.R.T. enable drive should be doing this passively in the background but it can be helpful to force a scan if you are having issues with the disk. You should really only do this after you have recovered any data from the disk you care about.

You can also find other tools and tips here.

Oh, and if the disk has signs of failing I would never trust it again to store anything you care about. Best to replace it with something new if you can. And remember, always backup your data - file recovery is never a good option and should only ever be used as a last ditch attempt.