They said systems dating back to the 80's, so I'm gonna guess that 8" are out, they didn't last all that long once 5.25" came along.

I'm so glad they didn't get these ready in time for the annual mint sets. I'm curious whether they will appear in the proof set yet to release this year, though.

rofl, even.

Professionally, I'm a teacher in a subject area totally unrelated to IT. My only formal training was a high-school program that taught me networking (in the days before wifi was common), and an intro to C++ course during college. Everything I've learned since has been piecemeal and self-taught. I'm forever grateful to those with the proper training who write up guides, answer questions, and generally help out those who don't have that training.

If Amazon sales of "MP3 players" are indicative it's simmering; I see a handful with over 1-2K sales per month (assuming we can trust those numbers, it is Amazon after all). I imagine it's going to be a bit muted for a while due to the memory and storage price gouging and that may push more people towards CD's, which are already seeing a resurgence.

I've not seen one thus far here on the Fediverse. If you haven't already, check out this site which has some exhaustive instructions for working with the BC-250 - it was invaluable when I got mine!

Quite true; this seems to be the standard practice, however, for companies when they want to keep the high prices hidden from casual viewing and commentary.

A student who graduated from my high school had their admission to a university rescinded for things they said and did in a Facebook group for accepted students.

They don't want the bad press of openly gouging people for that, especially with how bad prices are already.

If you want a smaller stepping stone, check out LMDE!

Oh, they have KDE in their repo, it's just not the out-of-box default.

If you're okay with something other than vanilla Debian, give Linux Mint Debian Edition a look. I used it for years without significant hiccups playing a wide variety of games. I switched to Bazzite after testing it out and liking the immutable aspects of it (though as another commenter mentioned, there is some pain involved in the learning curve), but I still keep LMDE around on my old gaming rig and on a couple other computers of mine.