I've been using Mint for a while on a home server, running 21.3. I'm new to administering Linux despite years of using it in development and puzzled about how one can make Update Manager tolerable.

Update Manager is nice in showing updates that are available but I don't understand why one has to supply their administrator password multiple times. Why not just once like using sudo with command line tools? 2 or 3 times is annoying, but when a flatpak package is updated it can be 10-20 times before the updates are done. Is there anyway to avoid this? The fact that I don't see tons of complaints about this makes me think it's just me and I must have something mis-configured. Any ideas?

I'm running Linux Mint on a home server that happens to run pihole. Since it's both a dhcp and dns server for my network, it has a static ip address. It has an ethernet connection as well as wifi and it's always been my understanding that you can't have two network interfaces sharing the same IP address, so I've been looking into ways to have one network adapter enabled and the other disabled and then if the network connection of the active device is lost, the other re-enables with the same IP address and disables the other device. This mostly work.

However while debugging one bit of software that seems to have a problem with me disabling my wifi adapter, I inadvertently enabled both the eth and wifi connections while each have the same, manually assigned ip address and everything so far just seems to work. I didn't think this was possible and I'm wondering, should I expect problems? I can connect to the machine remotely fine, pihole and dvr services installed on the box work. Is there any reason to believe this won't work?

I'm dual-booting my machine right now with CachyOS linux and Windows 10. A have a few VeraCrypt volumes originally created on Windows on an NTFS formatted disk that I'm trying to use and I'm having issues with one in linux.

One volume when it's mounted in VeraCrypt isn't writable (4.9TB volume) and the other is (3.0TB). Both volumes reside on the same physical disk and in the same directory. The disk they resides on is writable and my user has read, write and execute enabled on both volume files and the mount directory. If I try to copy a file to the 4.9TB volume however I get a message that it's a read-only file system. Checking the volume properties in Dolphin it shows it's writable though.

Output from mount does suggest it's mounted read-only though. Here you can see the difference between the two volumes, 1 and 2:

veracrypt on /tmp/.veracrypt_aux_mnt1 type fuse.veracrypt (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other)

/dev/mapper/veracrypt1 on /run/media/veracrypt1 type ntfs (ro,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0077,fmask=0077,iocharset=utf8)

veracrypt on /tmp/.veracrypt_aux_mnt2 type fuse.veracrypt (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other)

/dev/mapper/veracrypt2 on /run/media/veracrypt2 type exfat (rw,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,iocharset=utf8,errors=remount-ro)

So why exactly is VeraCrypt mounting it "ro" vs "rw" and is there anyway I can change that? Not sure if it matters but I'm using VeraCrypt version 1.26.24 on Linux, whereas on Windows I'm using 1.25.9.

Lately my home internet service has been experiencing brief periods of failure and I'm trying to understand what the root problem is and if there's anything I can do to fix it.

I have two piholes running on my home network providing DNS service and blocking. Lately I've been encountering brief internet outages, approximately once a day for the last week. Work laptop disconnects from VPN saying no internet and other devices show no internet either. Cable modem doesn't show it's lost connection though, and logging into my router it shows it has internet connectivity. Trying to ping a website shows the dns resolution isn't working. I can ping by IP address but not name. The outage usually resolves itself in approx 5 minutes, sometimes a little longer.

My piholes are setup to use Google, Cloudflare and Open DNS for dns service so I'm puzzled how my dns resolution suddenly starts failing. In theory if one's down, it'll use the others right? So how am I experiencing a dns outage? Is this a problem with something outside my network or something internal, or is there anything else I should do to diagnose and fix it?

I'm looking to install Linux on our home laptop and see if I can convince my wife to migrate off Windows. Since I'm not sure there won't be times we need or want to boot back into Windows, I want to set it up so we can dual boot. The laptop only has a spot for one drive however so I can't use two drives and chose them with the bios. I know in the past Windows has been problematic with dual boot setups on a single drive, corrupting the boot drive following updates and what-not. I'd really like to avoid that if possible.

Any suggestions on how best to go about it, or something I should at least avoid because it's known to be problematic?

Worked with linux servers plenty with a development job but new to running at home and using a desktop interface. I'm using RDP to access the machine and have run into a few issues I'm not sure how to solve.

First, I'm using Mate and I've noticed issues with have the panel/task bar disappearing. When the machine first boots my user account is logged in and if I then RDP into the machine, the panel doesn't show. If I go to the machine physically and logout, then when I RDP in I can see the panel, but that's a hassle. Seems only one instance of the panel with run. Do I need to create a different user to use with RDP to avoid this? Other options?

Second, physically working on the machine I can go into the network settings and make changes. However when I RDP into the machine - using the same user account - the widget to let me see and edit the details of the network interface is disabled. Why is it that a physical session seems to have sudo access through the UI but an RDP session doesn't? Can I change this too?