In BIOS/UEFI you will likely see multiple bootloader options, one for windows and one for Linux (I think mint's is called "ubuntu" by default). Choose the Linux one.
Merging the space after your Data partition is easy. Merging the space before it is slightly less trivial, but doable. GParted is your friend. It has the ability to grow an NTFS to the right, as well as slide it to the left. The slide is copying everything over though, so it will take time.
(Note that if you are mounting Data in your fstab using the string /dev/sda4 and you delete the partitions before it, you will likely need to update your fstab.)
Personally, I don't think you need to go as far as unhooking your Linux disk and live booting, but I understand being unsure about it. If any data on these drives is your only copy, that's your first mistake. Back up your data elsewhere (rule of 3, ideally). Then just use gparted carefully.
Afterwards, you'll need to regenerate grub to get the extra boot options to go away. Should be straight forward on mint.
It's gonna feels so good deleting all those nonsense windows partitions.
Edit: I glossed right over your links to your updates saying you had already done all of this lol. GG glad it went smooth for you! Also, I am surprised canceling the NTFS slide mid-copy didn't break anything lol. You might want to back that up and format the whole drive just to be safe. Never know when you'll find the files that were corrupted by that....maybe run an fsck on it.
If it's blocking AUR updates, it could be an attempt to keep some patches to certain exploits from going out? But it seems unlikely that the cost of a ddos is worth the tiny number of possibly vulnerable AUR users out there...
I have a friend who was trying out endeavor with kde. He uses a trackball mouse, and configuring the acceleration curve has been a nightmare for him. Apparently it's the wayland compositor's job to expose the ability to configure libinput, and only certain ones do it (KDE being one of them), but configuration isn't as straight forward as in windows.
He was more able to configure it when using X11, but kept hitting a bug when using a custom acceleration curve where the cursor would shoot to the top left of the screen (I think it triggered when moving the cursor while clicking).
I haven't looked into it much myself, but it sounds like it has been one of those unfortunate sticking points for him right out of the gate.
Eh, back when Moore's Law was alive, it was easily every 2-3 years. Around 2010 we hit a wall with transistor sizes and CPU speeds, which saw the time between upgrades rise considerably. A gaming PC from 2015 was very capable 5-7y later. Vendors have been spending all the time since coming up with ways to get that back down to 2-3, especially EOLing perfectly good hw artificially quickly.
If you have a file containing 4 bytes, where the first byte in the file is 0x01, second is 0x02, third is 0x03, and 4th is 0x04, and you keep that same order when you load them into the first 4 bytes of memory on an LE machine vs a BE machine, what value does the uint32 located at address 0 contain? On LE it's 0x04030201, on BE it's 0x01020304. So yes, it absolutely matters.
The nice thing about her being 10 is it's all the same to her. She doesn't have any preconceived notions about what the OS "should" do. If her only machine runs mint, then she'll figure out how to use mint.
The Arch repos are completely different from the AUR. The Arch repos are officially maintained and tested. The AUR is where anyone can go upload a little pkgbuild script to make building and installing an arbitrary package as easy as possible.
Arch's package manager (pacman) does not work with the AUR. The AUR is basically a glorified pastebin. It's a convenience for people who know what they're doing, but you should not go downloading and executing files at random from there. Arch explicitly warns against doing this, and deliberately does not ship with any easy way to do this.
I don't consider that the worst case, I consider that the secret weapon off FOSS, and what Linus would prefer to see. I don't think he wants Linux to be a kingdom who is afraid of what happens when their king dies. If the people aren't empowered to take the code, make it their own, and continue owning their devices, then they weren't in it for the freedom, just the freeloading.
I haven't been keeping up super close with this, but from the posts by Linus I have seen, I got the sense that he doesn't really care about bcachefs stability as much as the fact that Kent's changes keep touching common code at a time when they're hardening. If they were isolated to bcachefs I don't think Linus would care at all. And Linus keeps telling him not to try that, and Kent acts like he's being singled out and persecuted. That's my current understanding.
aka "promoting". They were specifically talking about using and not promoting.