You know, you can use a debugger...

Let's say, you have a piece of code that

1. takes some object

2. calls some function from it

Now, assuming clean code, your code expects actual objects, not none or undefined. You could go the lazy road and reject calls that you can't handle. But you'd have to do that in a lot of places. And you'll run into the problem again.

So you could think: WHY am I getting undefined/none here? This shouldn't happen on this object. So, instead of ignoring the illness and working around the symptom, you try to find the root cause of the problem, by setting breakpoints and running a debugger, tracing back the problem to where it originates from.

Then you fix the cause of the problem once and for all, instead of working with spaghetti code and workarounds.

@jhh2450 @irene
so...

click bait == cancer
is OK, in my opinion.

click bait == AIDS
OK

click bait == autism
Is not OK?

@Anaeijon PS: I remeber that the Sunfounder Mega from Amazon broke quickly. So I don't want to recommend it in general.

Mostly there is no way to tell the "Knockoffs" apart in Software.
How can it be Knockoffs, if it is open source Hardware and everyone is allowed to produce them?
Some of them are (in my experience) even better.
For example the original Aduino Nano and Pro Mini have terrible clock crystals. I'm using some from Aliexpress (Branded RobotDyn) which cost me about 2$/piece. The "original" costs about 22$ and is constantly sold out.
In general you can put yourself together these "starter sets" on eBay, Banggood or Aliexpress and get the parts a lot cheaper. Usually this is, what the sellers on amazon are doing.
Quality of the cables included in most sets sold on amazon is terrible anyway. The only brand I had quite a good experience on Amazon with was Sunfounder - which again is a brand, available in all china shops while reselling to europe and america over amazon with increased price.

@Noob You can simply install it on your main distro.
i3 itself doesn't conflict with anything.
Whenever I set up some new distro I always install i3 or sway as a backup desktop environment, which I can simply call from terminal, for example if some display drivers are broken and 3d acceleration (which is needed -as far as I know - at least by gnome, KDE, Mate, Budgie etc.) doesn't work.
Then I copy the i3 settings from my main Laptop and get a running environment I'm used to on every system without sacrificing much resources.
Just select it in your desktop manager as desktop environment after boot.
This has the benefit, that you can still run and use all the tools from your other desktop environment by calling them manually through dmenu.
It helped me understanding all the components of KDE and how far they tie into each other when I first switched from KDE to i3.

@Noob
... but not only everything is customizable, you will also need to customize everything to make it in any way usable.
First you define your hotkeys. Than which program you want to use to launch applications. dmenu? rofi? j4-dmenu? something?
Which terminal emulator do you want?
Do you want a hotkey for that terminal to launch or are you fine launching it over the launcher application?
Do you need a status bar? Should it display something? How should it display something?
Wait... What? What is that pointer-thing you have there? A "mouse"? Well... Weird.
Oh... You can click on things?
So... You also want to launch things by clicking on the status bar? Wtf? You can configure that. But it's still weird.
You use programs with popups, that don't fit into i3 window managing... Good luck.
Wayland? Hey, I'm SWAY now. I can use Wayland. Forget about i3. I just don't get your keyboard layout.

I still love i3 and allways use it as main DE.
But for a newbie it must be really weird.

#meToo
It was my first own PC.
It is still laying around somewhere.

That's a lot of RAM for a phone...

By the way... The data of one IBM 350 would fit 256000 times in that hand.

You can install Steam in Linux and stream anyway.

@Lrsen Yes!
In my opinion it's much more user- and newbefriendly than Ubuntu.

The Desktop (Cinnamon or MATE) is a lot more like Windows, than Ubuntus Unity or Gnome 3 Desktop.
It even looks like Windows if you install the correct themes.

It has a GUI for everything Ubuntu has one for, is as easy to use in all points but it doesn't actively hide things from you. You get faster a better feeling how Linux works under the hood.

Everything that works in Ubuntu works in Mint. Because Mint is based on Ubuntu.
If you find a instruction how to do something in Ubuntu, it will work in Mint 95%.

It is based on Ubuntu LTS versions, so I would consider it more stable than the regular Ubuntu.
But it gets some updates later. Extremely new hardware might not be supported.
On the other hand it can configure correctly some hardware out of the box, which is hard in Ubuntu. Like Laptops with Nvidia GPU with Optimus technology...

And (as bonus) it brings a lot of nice stuff, you will acknowledge later.

@CozyPlanes @Root
Sry for that... I just noticed it's not Japanese... So I assumed Chinese... Sry.

@Kyo98
Yes. But it's the best most people can do.

Well... I can't read chinese, but isn't there some Malware on your Computer?

@Lahsen2016
I know.
But I rather don't touch that system anymore.
It is old and outdated.
It's just my backup.
But a awesome backup.

I stopped using it about 2 years ago, when I finally felt ready to switch to Arch.
Recently accidentally booted it because I broke something in my UEFI settings or so.
And remembered: Mint is awesome...
Whatever I do, it always keeps bootable. After booting it I just needed 10 minutes to make my main system bootable again.
So natural to handle that. All Tools I need installed. Just nice.

Only weird thing... Using the Cinnamon desktop again, after getting conftable with i3wm and loads of hotkeys for 1 year now.

Mint got a special place in my GPT.

@CluelessBanana But do _you_ need to control them if you are not connected to your home WiFi?
I mean... In general you won't switch on and off your home lights from somewhere else.

Do they need constant internet access or is a LAN sufficient?
If LAN is good, just get a cheap router and set up a secondary LAN in your room which is not connected to the Internet. Connect all Smart Home Devices to it.
If these things need Internet access, I just don't understand what the devs were thinking.

Cheap Router recommendation:
Nexx WT3020 (10€ from China, look at Aliexpress)
flash LEDE on it (Simple to use OpenWRT-Fork, easy instruction on LEDE website available)
Put a stick in it to install more applications.
I think there are also OpenWRT modules available for some of these smart home devices.

Preinstalled?

In General: I would recommend doing a clean install.
You can never know.
Regular Anti malware software might, for example, not check proxy settings, wrongly signed SSL keys or third party DNS and Keyserver settings.
The things Lenovo did for example.

#JustWindowsUserProblems
#SimpleInLinux

@KimberlyTheGeek
I understand that and I think it is OK.
You get a much nicer package, custom made case and components to perfectly fit and work together and probably easy to understand kids friendly instructions.
Probably the setup was already tested.
All these things have a price.
The custom OS is not a big selling point (after all, it is open source and you could load it on any raspberry pi), but nice that they take the work of doing research yourself off of you.

For Parents who want a educational and actually working christmas gift: perfect.

My answer was directed to @Nanos , who was thinking about building something like that by himself but at a lower price.
I think it is legitimate to tell him, that all of this will cost about 60€ instead of 300€ if you buy the parts directly from chinese manufacturers and put them together yourself.

I was working for a small company which was building Escape Room Games. And finding those good cheap pieces and bundle them was my job.

@Nanos Oh shit...
WTF?
You can get a full refurbished Thinkpad for half of that price.

Just get a 7'' Screen with HDMI Driver board for about 20$ from China:
http://s.aliexpress.com/ZbI3Q773

and a USB-Keyboard for 5$ (also from China)
http://s.aliexpress.com/na2myumy
These latex keyboards are terrible for typing, but super cheap and ultimately water and dirt resistant.

Get a Box slightly bigger than the screen (tin or wooden boxes of chocolates are great and cheap) and put everything in there. Cut a hole for the screen. Finished.

You won't get much cheaper than that.
Maybe if you have a broken laptop laying around and find a HDMI driver board for the screen for less than 15$. That way you could get a bigger screen for a slightly lower price. But you would need luck and some skill for that.

You can also get cheaper by not using a RasPi.
How about a OrangePi?
again - You guessed it - from China:
http://s.aliexpress.com/FZr2Yje6
Use Armbian on it

Or get a broken Laptop on ebay.

Either use native sqlite or a look at Dataset:
https://dataset.readthedocs.io/en/...
It is based on the universal SQLAlchemy Library but does most things for you automatically.
If you don't have a Database it even creates one for you.
And it connects to nearly every DBMS you would want to use.
Also dataset transforms the database into a nice object oriented structure to work with in your script.

If you need more functionality you can always run SQLAlchemy commands over Dataset.

For development, I would recommend sqlite-backend with dataset, because Dataset simply creates the sqlite-.db file for you.
Later you can switch to any other DBMS by changing a single line at the top of your sourcecode.

@HRT-713
I didn't know about the new versions.
But according to google, only the RaspberryPi Zero W has Bluetooth and WiFi, which is only available since 2017 and doubled the official price.

Somehow... I don't like that thing.
I never came up with something it could be meant.

You've got a tiny super low power computer.
Naturally I would say: headless networking device.
But it got relatively good graphics and no networking.
So... Nope

Maybe a mobile something?
Lacks networking and you'll need to connect some USB-Peripherals. So you would need a OTG adapter, which is about half the size of the zero and makes it chunky for a mobile device.

Maybe connect stuff over Bluetooth? Well... No Bluetooth.

Home TV / Kodi Player ...
Hooking up a IR sensor on the pins...
Yea... Could work.
again: no Networking.
Playing Media from a USB drive --> need OTG dongle.

Only useful thing: it got a camera connector.
You could write some scripts that apply filters on it and display them on a HDMI screen.
You could even save them on SD.
Or Face detection in combination with something connected to the pin header.

Whatever else you would want to do:
take another RasPi or (for price) OrangePi

Hack the traffic light to let it stay in red all the time.

@lxmcf
"Build all yourself"
Put a SD card and a wireless USB Keyboard in a Raspberry Pi and hook it onto a little screen.
I mean... Good enough for kids.
But for adults "Build all yourself" is something else.

lol...
"web dev"
"allways right"

@willol I'm pretty sure I can start multiple installation instances.
For example doing pacman -Syyu to update all packages, which will take a while and running another pacman -S in another Terminal or screen, because you don't want to wait for the update to finish, before installing something else, that you need.
I wouldn't advice doing this. But I remember that it worked.
I'm not in reach of my computer right now, but will defiantly check tomorrow.

Desktop Shortcuts are the most stupid Computer design thing ever...
I mean... You basically need to close everything to use them.
Think about the alternative: a customizeable optionally full screen Start menu (if you need as much space as on your desktop), where you can put all the things and launch them.
You know... Like in Unity, GNOME, KDE, Windows 10, Windows 8...

It's like a better desktop with faster access.

Oh... Wait... You can't place files in the Windows 10 start menu? Well... I think you can in most Linux desktops (not sure... But in KDE it works)

And not able to install multiple programs at the same time... Yes... That's a odd thing in Ubuntu. Archlinux and derivates are able to do this without problems.

correction:
remove the \b in the regex