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The Arch wiki in the sibling comment is a good resource for learning a lot. I'll try to (over)simplify the short version here:

With the old BIOS-based boot process, the computer (the hardware/motherboard; not the operating system you ran on it) would, when it started up, look around for installed operating systems to boot. It wouldn't look too hard: on each hard disk, it would look in one (or, if you were lucky, four) places for a specially-prepared segment outside of the data installed by the operating system. This segment isn't a file or something that you can browse to normally on the drive (though some things shimmed it so it appeared thus); it's a non-file special segment outside of the OS's normal data/files. That segment (well, segments, but still) had to be set up just so otherwise the computer (BIOS) wouldn't find your OS to boot it. Doing this was often tricky, even more so when you needed multiple operating systems to be bootable. Doing this was also pretty inelegant, since if you wanted to stick an operating system on a sub-partition of a disk, as part of the installation process you had to mess with data that affected everything on that disk, not just what was in the sub-partition. It worked, and was simple, but it was the equivalent of being forced to modify a single central global variable in a software project every time one sub-part (file, function, whatever) of that project wanted to use a new library. For an excellent writeup of the gritty details of the…

A lot of Windows tweaks are turned into GUIs. You CAN edit the registry yourself, or tweak Group Policy, but honestly sometimes it's easier just to get the tools that do it for you with a checkbox.

Some useful tools:

-Chocolatey is like yum/homebrew for Windows: https://chocolatey.org/

-Start11 (and other Stardock tools): https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/ let you once again customize W11's butchered start menu & taskbar

-Software controls for your monitor's backlight: https://twinkletray.com/

-Easy Window Switcher so you can use alt-` to switch between windows of the same app, like macOS and I think some Linux desktops: https://neosmart.net/EasySwitch/

-Microsoft PowerToys for various tweaks: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

-Nevermind the install footprint... not worth it when you start running into update issues. Yes, there are tools out there, but why bother when you can just buy a bigger SSD?

-Windows key --> Startup Apps to disable all the useless start apps (like Adobe or Cortana)

-Windows key --> diskmgmt.msc to manage volumes

-Turn on BitLocker if you want full disk encryption

-Taking screenshots is a PITA; use Windows-Shift-S for the newest version (snipping tool), but the old print-screen /alt-printscreen shortcuts work too. Also Windows-Alt-R to record a video of the current window. For some reason that is tied into the Xbox app.

-Use 1password (or your browser if you're lazy) to sync passwords between platforms. Also…

When running X on a previous Debian version, it was possible to edit the synaptic settings to prevent accidental touchpad touches when typing (along with a lot of other settings to make the user experience excellent).

Now running Wayland on Debian 11/Bullseye (with Gnome), there are only a few possible simple settings (that I can find), and so I have continual issues with window de-focussing due to accidentally touching the touchpad.

Is there anything that I can do now to fix this issue?

(I took a look at the blog post and also the https://neosmart.net/blog/2020/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux/ link, but still don't understand the state of things and if my problem is solved by installing any of these new packages.)

edit> The libinput webpage says this:
"How do I configure my device on Wayland?
See Where is the configuration stored? Use the configuration tool provided by your desktop environment (e.g. gnome-control-center) or direct access to your desktop environment’s configuration storage (e.g. gsettings)."

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/faqs.html#how-do-i-configure-my-device-on-wayland

Does this mean that it is not possible to set anything that isn't included in Gnome's minimal settings of libinput?

> Came here to say the same. The problem is they seem to be hiding information (for some reason):

Back when I worked at a computer shop I've had customers come to the shop with a hand-written report of the Windows XP BSOD message; like, all of this.[1] They were always very nice people by the way.

Also, all the text is boilerplate and 100% irrelevant to the actual error (UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME). It's not going to be fixed by a Windows update (which you can't install since you can't boot the thing) or disabling "caching" BIOS options. Not showing any text instead of that is probably better. It wouldn't be too hard to make a error message → useful description map for common problems like this, but good error messages/help was never Windows' strong point...

[1]: https://neosmart.net/wiki/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013/08/unmountable-boot-volume.png

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Cheers!

BLAKE2b mentioned above would be more than twice faster on 64-bit CPUs. But I think we'll soon see SHA-256 CPU instructions on most processors (ARM and lower-cost Intel and latest AMD already ship them -https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/will-amds-ryzen-finally-bring-sha-extensions-to-intels-cpus/), so I guess it's not important. For numbers, see blake2.net or bench.cr.yp.to.

For IoT devices, hashes that work on 32-bit words, like SHA-256, actually make more sense and will be faster, so BLAKE2s would work well.

What I'd like to hear from the above commenter is about a faster replacement for buzhash, which I'm also interested in.