While 2026 has already seen its share of disruptive events, none have cause the war in Ukraine to stop or even slow down. Long range attacks are now practically daily events, casualties are high, and significant parts of the Ukrainian population have faced a cold winter with limited electricity and other utilities.

With the war now eclipsing the so called Great Patriot War in length today I want to look at how the war economies of Russia and Ukraine are holding up and some of the key risks they are likely to face going into 2026.

The Oreshnik is a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear weapons...

The missile used in the attack on Lviv, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the Polish border, was not equipped with nuclear warheads.

;tldr Beginning to use a new OS, even using a distro as friendly as Mint, is harder than the overall community says it is. The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information. That said I’m happy I switched.

I’m not a programmer. If you are someone who is unfamiliar with GNU/Linux you probably aren’t either. Good news: a week after you start using Linux you’ll feel like one! Here are some critical things I eventually learned while installing Ubuntu/Mint:

You should expect to use the terminal . Period. Something about your particular hardware or software setup may require special tweaks or install that requires typing. Anyone who even hints this isn’t the case is at best deluded. I know this is a deal-breaker for many people but I’d rather not waste your time.

Locations and commands are case-sensitive . -h means help -H Human-readable (or is it the other way around? More typing yay!). It's in /etc/ X 11, not /etc/x11 (something almost impossible to see the difference of on a blurry 1080i resolution not being properly displayed).

While the basic user storage locations mimic what you are used to, the underlying system organization is completely impossible to navigate. Pertinent files can be scattered over several locations for whatever reason so don’t even bother trying to figure out a pattern and just follow guides. That said,

Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be important but has been deprecated or relocated and now redundant. Speaking of which,

It is possible/probable your distro is effectively a skin of another older distro , so you should search the underlying distro directions too in case there aren’t any for the ‘skin’ you’re using.

All said and done, I am very happy to say I now have my Mint OS on a portable USB keychain that I can use on any PC (assuming TPM permission). The actual OS is pleasantly unobtrusive, nimble, and supports 90% of what I want to do with it. Critical failings seem to be completely relegated to proprietary software (for me, 1080i support was abandoned by all the graphics card developers years ago and I’m unable to either find older working drivers like I can in Win10, or find/figure out the tweaking needed to force the issue). Check all your mission critical programs to see if they are Linux compatible , or ‘simply’ learn to use the open-source competitor if they aren’t.

In December, Sweden announced a 10bn kronor (£800m) cut in development funding to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania and Bolivia. Germany's humanitarian budget of €1.05bn (£920m) for 2026 will be less than half of last year's, with spending refocused on areas deemed a priority to Europe.

The UK also announced earlier this year that it would be cutting aid to fund defence spending. Norway has increased its civilian support to Ukraine by 2.5bn kroner (£185m), to a quarter of its aid budget, but has been accused of making Africa pay for that rise with a 355m kroner cut (£26m).

France's budget for 2026 will also see a €700m cut to aid spending, with a 60% reduction in food aid, while increasing defence spending by €6.7bn.

I'm literally deciding which distro to install as a first timer. It's my understanding that Mint is the best for beginners migrating from M$ but knowing nothing about why this is the case one thing nags me:

Why do people switch distro's? What isn't in Mint that you get elsewhere? I really don't want to waste time using Mint if I'm just going to have to reinstall something else because it turns out it is bad for gaming or doesn't support many devices or something.