My printers are all ancient and suffering various problems. Rather than continue to struggle to keep them running, I am thinking of buying a newer printer. The one I favor, the Brother HL-L2400D is especially appealing for NOT having fancy networking options that just make it hackable. Wifi printers??? No. Just no.

But on researching it, one of the things I have learned is that there is no MacOS driver for this printer. That normally wouldn't be a concern since I don't own Apple hardware, except I thought Apple used the CUPS system like all other *nix based OSes? Do they? How would I check if there is a CUPS driver for this printer before buying one and plugging it into a computer running some flavor of Linux? I would hope there is a reference somewhere that can be checked?

I've setup the Devuan version of Peppermint OS, just to see what it's like. I installed Chrome because it seems to be necessary to access some sites. And when I start Chrome for the first time after a boot it wants a password for a keyring. When I installed Chrome on Devuan with XFCE, it also wanted a keyring and I couldn't get around it and couldn't run Chrome. Had to install with Cinnamon and then it was possible to get Chrome to run. Apparently it was something 'default' to Gnome, which Cinnamon is based on.

It looks like the people who setup Peppermint OS did something different. It is possible to get Chrome to run on XFCE by entering a password for the keyring. What do you suppose they did differently?

Here's a desktop app that doesn't get discussed much!

The default calculator in Daedalus just doesn't work. Any time I start it, it just freezes and I have to kill it. Not a really big deal since I usually install Galculator, and prefer that. But the default app gets launched by default when you push the calculator button on any MS sponsored keyboard. So I've seen it pop up a few times. And been puzzled that it's always unusable.

What could be wrong with it?

So far I have always avoided using LVM as it seemed like an extra layer of abstraction, and to my mind code, on top of any other drivers needed to access the drives. Does LVM really add any overhead to disk access? Can it slow down a system at all? Or is it only relevant at the install phase, and then at the time of any modifications of the disk layout?

When you use one of those 'whole partition' transfer utilities to copy a system from an old HD to an SSD, does the OS notice the change in hardware? I seem to recall there are differences in how an OS should behave on one vs the other, but I don't know if that is something fixed at install time, or if it should be manually changed, or if it's automatically recognized.

Clearly, a local database is kept when you run apt-get update. Where is it stored? If I install a third-party program of some sort, such as Google Chrome, and it adds a repository for itself, is that kept in the same place? And if I later remove this program, what happens to that extra database? Does it get removed automatically? Or do I have to manually delete it somehow?