1) Depends on reliance on X11.
2) Maybe.
3) Probably not.

If you got enough experience to ask this, it might me a good idea to move to a KDE-friendly distro. AFAIK, Linux Mint does not like KDE.

1. Years.
2. IDK
3. No.

Cinnamon development is glacial. It works, but the project simply does not have the resources to properly keep up or even triage important fixes.

It's one of the reasons I didn't stick with mint, and tend not recommend it if someone can use something else. When I stopped using it, the setting that was supposed to allow games in fullscreen to display without compositing was borked, costing you frames and latency. It had been that way for years.

1. They have an experimental Wayland session already. It mostly works except for some pretty important stuff...I also haven't seen development on it for a long while.
2. I think this is almost a 100% no.
3. I tried to implement that myself. Making them shorter than the screen is easy. Making them appear above the edge of the screen is hard, but not impossible - the code is in JavaScript and the logic is kind of disjoint across multiple files and stuff depends on panels being at the edge of the screen - I didn't do it in the end because it was too much effort for something I didn't want that much.

Ham radio in the US has restrictions on sending encrypted data over ham frequencies.

They can't stop you, they probably won't even catch you unless you are egregious about it. But if they do catch you, it's like a $10,000 fine.

I think the whole world is quickly moving closer to China's model. Everything that gets encrypted will need the government's key on it anything they can't decrypt will get blocked.

You basically set up some rules at the backbone level looking for suspect traffic. They could now have AI review the suspect traffic and try to tell if what's going on is viable data or nonsense words/coded messages. All communications will need to be identified. None of the blocking would work real time but once they know who's sending it in think that you've sent some stuff that you shouldn't be sending they could just turn you off.

I read an article somewhere recently where AI was able to tell if an image was being used with even the most advanced steganography with a fairly high reliability.

They'll never be able to stop people from privately communicating at small scale, But man will there be some watch lists.

The same way they prevent you from transmitting any other illegal content: they fine you and/or throw you in jail if they know you're doing it.

It's trivially easy to detect encrypted messages just by measuring the entropy of each message. A messaging provider would just turn you in if they detect it.

You could probably get away with peer-to-peer messaging, but your ISP would be able to detect that you're using unapproved encryption and then turn you in to the government.

people can already "vibe code" p2p encrypted apps for communications, its not that hard and it will only get easier to do.

HOWEVER. obviously not bullet proof, and once meaningful quantum computing combines with AI every keystroke and deleted message, every sneeze or fart you had near a smart phone or a router in your life will be recorded and accessed by it, at the will of its controllers.

every recorded secret will be known, or at least be accessible. the blackmail is gonna be off the chain hook. people are going to start doing things that make zero sense. and youll know why.

"in 2008, senator, you googled "how to tuck my wiener so i can fart into my urethra" in twelve separate variations, and when that didnt yield the results you wanted. you looked up "how to inject fart into urethra, safely".......... now, you are going to vote yay on the children coal miners bill, or we'll drop 2008s search history, and maybe take a look at 2014 to see how you discovered how you wanted to be a furrys "dog knotted bitch slave" while on vacation in vegas......looks like we have all the messages.....every second of your visit was recorded by your cell phone and iWatch, all the way down to your heart rate spiking when "white fang" pegged you for the first time that weekend.....so.....its gonna be a.....yay?"

Pretty easy honestly.

You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.

As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.

Tada. There's no way around this that doesn't involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you're sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).

The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn't be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.

Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than "Russians" or "think of the children" or the usual criminals and terrorists.

They can't stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that's more than enough to control thought and action of the population.

I put KDE Fedora on a MacBook Air circa 2013 iirc. It’s old heh. It runs well but it hates the new kernel. So after a lot of poking around to find a solution to the full hardware kernel panic lockups I found it was a problem with the wifi, as usual. You might get luckier than me since it’s only a couple chipsets they use that choke.

That said even with that issue I just locked the kernel at 5.15 and it runs just fine. I started with 38 and I’ve upgraded every release until current without any issue.

I ran Xubuntu on a 2011 macbookpro I upgraded to 8gb RAM and an ssd. It runs fine, but it's no longer good as a daily driver because the architecture doesn't support decoding basic video codecs we take for granted to watch youtube and so on.

So it will work, but you may find web-based stuff will make the cpu spike to 90%.

It's pre-T2, so it should be very easy to install a Linux distro on it. The only bit of misery you're going to encounter, as others have said, is the Broadcom drivers. Except for a select few distros, you'll probably need a USB Ethernet adapter for installing the operating system and adding the drivers.

Also, I'd rather put my hand in the circle saw than try running a rolling release on this laptop because the driver uses DKMS, meaning that kernel updates sometimes break it.

I only know this because the desktop I'm typing this on has a Broadcom Wi-Fi card from when I used to bare metal Hackintosh this machine. I've since moved to a nice house with an Ethernet port in every room; also, I just use macOS in a VM these days anyways.

As others have said, OCLP is a thing and a well-oiled machine from what I hear, but also, the oath I have made to the Church of Linuxology demands that I at least recommend Linux.

I have Linux on:
- 2013 MacBook Air
- 2017 MacBook Air
- 2021 MacBook Air
- 2009 MacBook Pro
- 2012 MacBook Pro
- 2008 iMac
- 2015 iMac
- 2013 Mac Pro

I predict that EndeavourOS will run beautifully on your 2014 MacBook Air. You need out-of-kernel drivers for both the Broadcom WiFi and the FacetimeHD camera but EOS has you covered on both. They will both update automatically when you update the kernel. EOS has much faster WiFi on my 2013 than the other distros I have tried. Chimera Linux works beautifully as well but that may not be your scene.

I have not tried Mint on any of the hardware above so unfortunately, I cannot say how well it would work. Perhaps just fine though I wonder about the webcam.

As you guessed, installing Linux on that hardware is just holding down the Option key to boot of the USB. It is pretty close to regular PC hardware with a slightly odd UEFI. Everything works, even all the media keys, brightness control, etc.

You can use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to put a newer version of macOS on that hardware as well. As you can tell though, I think Linux is the better play. You will be amazed at how well the 2014 runs.

[edit: I just read some of the other comments. I never had any of those issues with EOS. I really recommend it for that hardware.]

It works but be careful with wifi. The other user said that it works out of the box with endeavourOS, and I know you can install it later with Linux Mint too, but the problem is that this wifi driver for the older chips (from 2011 to 2013 at least) is buggy. In my 2011 macbook air it would crash the whole OS on heavy downloads, and on my 2012 one it won't come up from sleep. So I bought a super tiny supported usb wifi dongle to deal with the problem. Now my two macbook airs work 100% with Linux.

My 2015 macbook air works great with the linux wifi driver, but it has no web cam support, and the driver on github is buggy and not updated for newer kernels anymore.

I just installed Endeavour0S on a 2013 13" MacBook Pro last week and it was like every other installation.
I had no problems whatsoever.
Even with a current KDE Plasma that little thing runs great.

The only mac specific thing I did was install github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan… for some fan control.

GitHub - linux-on-mac/mbpfan: A simple daemon to control fan speed on all MacBook/MacBook Pros (probably all Apple computers) for Linux Kernel 3 and newer

A simple daemon to control fan speed on all MacBook/MacBook Pros (probably all Apple computers) for Linux Kernel 3 and newer - linux-on-mac/mbpfan

^GitHub