I also don’t use Mint personally, but based on their releases page, it looks like they follow the Ubuntu LTS releases. The latest LTS version of Ubuntu is already being used for Mint 22.1, so I wouldn’t expect to see Gimp 3 until the next LTS release in April of 2026.

Debian based distros are notorious for using old, but known stable packages. That’s kind of their whole thing. If you want the latest and greatest, look for a rolling release based distro.

Sorry for the late reply. The optiplex is absolutely sold as a desktop, but I’ve been using it as a server for a couple of years. Very small, quiet, and it sips power, but it only has support for 2 2.5" SATA drives (though it does have plenty of USB 3 ports if you don’t mind using external storage). TrueNAS installed on it would be similar to your Synology setup (without the vendor lock in), though not nearly as convenient as the front bays you’re used to.

It’s yours if you want it, but no worries otherwise.

That would be awesome. I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro that might be better suited for your needs after you play around with the big server. Maybe we could trade?

Depending on where you’re located I would happily pay for shipping.

If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands. I have a rack designed for that kind of hardware and all of the infrastructure to fully support it.

I would recommend editing your fstab and use the USB drive’s UUID to mount it to a consistent location. That way, even if you reboot or disconnect the drive and the reconnect it to, say, a different USB port, it will always mount to the same mountpoint.

See this page from the arch wiki for more info.

is there a Linux… idk what to call it, type? OS? Thing??? that runs out of the box without me having to install additional software manually or at least automatic setup wizards

The word you are looking for is called a distribution, or distro for short.

I’m surprised no one else has mentioned Bazzite, which should be exactly what you’re looking for.

is there any specific hardware that works easier with Linux

An AMD GPU for sure. Nvidia drivers have come a long way, but they don’t generally behave as well out of the box like AMD.

Ah, I believe that would be from a college course.

Statements that start with # in C/C++ are known as preprocessor directives, that is, they are executed before compilation begins. OP has used a #define which will replace any instance of A (IF(x)) with B (while (x)) in the code.

So the IF statement is really just a while statement.