I never saw a reason to give my not-do-hard-earned money to discord, but I have done so elsewhere online, and I will continue to do so.

My approach is always the same: I use this one card I have that is by default blocking online purchases. But I can through my bank app allow online purchases for the next hour. Works great for those “free” trials that require your card details, hoping you’ll forget to subscribe.

You have one per installed kernel. Not sure what (if any) automagic is common for removing old kernels, I guess this varies between distros, but at least on my computers, old kernel remain. At least the previous one, maybe more. It comes in handy in case a kernel upgrade breaks something, which it actually did recently on one of my laptops - makes it easier to boot from old kernel and revert.

EDIT: I just checked. I have just one on my daily driver. It’s quite new, and I don’t think I’ve had a kernel upgrade on that one, so it makes sense.

On my work laptop (the one with borked kernel upgrade) I have two.

So what you most likely have is one or more vmlinuz-version-numbers, and then simply a symlink named just vmlinuz to the version you boot from.

Short answer to your last paragraph:
vmlinuz is the kernel. It ends with z instead of x, because it’s z-compressed to save space. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to use an uncompressed kernel for that 1ms faster boot time)
Initramfs (not intramuscular, which my autocorrect thinks is appropriate) is a small filesystem blob, “initial ram filesystem”, meant to be loaded directly into ram to allow the kernel to talk to your hardware via drivers. It also has a lot of binaries needed to perform other tasks that need to run before the root filesystem is mounted.

Plural.

Can’t be arsed fixing that for you.

“It just works”

…because that is the state of a mainstream modern distro, and it’s not true of Windows anymore.

Alternatively “No nagging, no forced online account.”

cd /usr/ports/hammertothehead && make && make install

…for FreeBSD users

yum install melatonin

I would’ve liked to see him try mint instead. Less fluff, and hopefully that would’ve gone better for him.

They ruined each other. I preferred both when they didn’t affect each other - Your neighbor didn’t get her news and science lessons from a crackpot blog, and your favorite online community wasn’t based on identity politics. The only identity that mattered was your username.

Nej