I can’t say anything definitively about any health claims, but as someone who lives (and occasionally struggles) with very hard water, activated carbon filters absolutely do make a difference in regards to calcification at and around every tap/faucet.

I should probably set a timer or alarm of some sort, but it’s easy to visually see when it’s time to replace my filters.

They absolutely did exist in the 20th century, but they were much heavier and bulky, used resistive touch screens, had awful battery life, and were understandably very primitive compared to modern tablets.

I also don’t use Mint personally, but based on their releases page, it looks like they follow the Ubuntu LTS releases. The latest LTS version of Ubuntu is already being used for Mint 22.1, so I wouldn’t expect to see Gimp 3 until the next LTS release in April of 2026.

Debian based distros are notorious for using old, but known stable packages. That’s kind of their whole thing. If you want the latest and greatest, look for a rolling release based distro.

is there a Linux… idk what to call it, type? OS? Thing??? that runs out of the box without me having to install additional software manually or at least automatic setup wizards

The word you are looking for is called a distribution, or distro for short.

I’m surprised no one else has mentioned Bazzite, which should be exactly what you’re looking for.

is there any specific hardware that works easier with Linux

An AMD GPU for sure. Nvidia drivers have come a long way, but they don’t generally behave as well out of the box like AMD.

Tim Cook is on the board of Directors BTW: https://www.apple.com/leadership/

Not from the US but currently living here. I would say the Disability Act is the gold standard worldwide. The amount of consideration for people with a variety of disabilities that almost universally applies is exceptionally amazing. It’s kind of shocking to see the dedication to adhering to that law while otherwise abandoning that portion of the population (e.g. Healthcare, SSDI, etc.).

That really depends on your use case and how valuable web search is for your daily life.

I’ve personally tried Google, Bing, DDG, Brave search, and ChatGPT. Kagi is consistently able to find what I’m searching for more quickly and accurately than anything else, which has been very valuable for me in my personal and professional life.

It’s easily worth the cost in result quality and time saving for me personally, but that doesn’t mean the same will apply to you or anyone else.

As far as stand out features, there aren’t really any that I can think of. It just gives me the results I’m looking for without any bullshit to wade through.

It’s a very minor annoyance and well worth it in my opinion.

I was searching for a book quote for over a year. I tried every search engine, tried changing the terms, checking back several times every few weeks or so, but couldn’t find anything even close. I tried kagi and it was literally the very first result on my very first search.

I haven’t looked back and have never had an issue finding what I’m searching for since.

I use playlet on roku which uses invidious, but I recommend setting up your own invidious instance since YouTube has been cracking down on the public instances.

After reading the article I’m pretty sure it’s the former. It’s an inkjet printer with “advanced print head technology,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

I’ll stick with my laser printer for documents and dye-sub for photos.