Laugh at or complain about Ubuntu all you wish… but this type of effort really puts Linux as a compelling competitor to Windows for enterprise desktop users. Rather than paying for the Windows software license and then Microsoft or 3rd party support for the OS on top, the fees would be for dedicated operating system and package support against criticial vulnerabilities. Wouldn’t a business rather have something that “just works as it is” over the long term, rather than something that leaves sysadmins holding their breath every Patch Tuesday with Microsoft randomly shoehorning in “features” here and there that have to be shutoff in GP editor?
More people using Ubuntu means more will be comfortable switching away from mac/Windows. Plus the free software components benefit from having a dedicated team securely supporting the packages over the long term.
The longstanding issue that remains is all the industry-specialized software either crappily-coded or riddled with DRMs and whatnot don’t support Linux well yet.
This is valid for end users too. Ubuntu Pro is free for up to 5 machines. People can install 22.04 and stay on it for 10 years or 24.04 for 12 years. That’s the kind of boring stable desktop operation that only Windows XP has managed to muster and people loved it. It’s perfect for the kind of folks who hate having to do major OS upgrades, as well as people who support others for free. Cough … family IT … cough. You bet your ass the family members I support would stay on 22.04 for a looong time!
Probably not the ideal method, but I’ve used a virtual machine with the disk connected via USB and then mounted to the VM to achieve something like this. It doesn’t interfere with the existing disks or UEFI of any actual hardware then.
I’m not sure if Ubuntu requires a wired internet connection. I’ve installed a different distro yesterday and wifi worked fine during the installation. The installer asked me to connect to network and I used the wifi. I’ve never plugged a network cable into the machine. Maybe it’s the same with Ubuntu. But sure, there are other possibilities. Offline installers and/or you can install Linux on a different machine and then swap the harddisk/ssd. Just take care not to overwrite the internal disk of your laptop. Make sure it writes to the correct disk (or unplug other ones).
Same as Debian since Bookworm (12). Nonfree firmware comes in the installation files now, so you can opt in or out at that stage and not have to scramble if you forgot.
That’s it. I have installed Ubuntu many times connected over Wi-Fi without any problems, except one special case many years ago. In that case, the system had some brand new Wi-Fi adapter, so I had to install the driver over Ethernet. But in almost any case it just should work and you can simply try to get a wireless connection in a live sytem to find out. And as mentioned above, internet connection is not necessary while installing from USB stick with the usual image. Its just recommended to save time and install the latest updates of some components during the initial system installation. But of course, you can do it later and of course you can do it over Wi-Fi (except some very rare special cases as mentioned at the beginning).
Yes you can do that, make sure you are on the same CPU infrastructure (ie, don't try to install linux on an SSD from an intel laptop if you're going to be running it on an arm based processor or something).
Yes, just make sure that the boot setup for the distro install is compatible with what you intend to install it onto (I.E. if your server is going to be using EFI to boot an OS, install your Ubuntu instance as GPT, EFI onto the SSD). Depending on what wireless modules you are using and where you are sourcing them and how you are installing them, you might need to ensure Secure Boot is disabled in the BIOS of your server. This will be the case if the kernel module package you are installing doesn’t sign the wireless adapter driver you intend to use. Otherwise, most drivers you could possibly need should be baked into the kernel and you should be good to go.
(One further sidenote coming from someone who has not used Ubuntu in a long time (since 16.04’s release), it would be good to check in the /etc/fstab file that the filesystem references are using either UUID or PARTUUID. Depending upon the drive layout of the server you are mounting the intended drive into, traditionally labeled references such as sda or nvme0n1 can change depending upon the slots each drive is seated. Using UUID or PARTUUID in the fstab reference alleviates any potential complications from this scenario where fstab might reference the wrong drive in mounting partitions. I do believe Ubuntu would likely do this by default nowadays, but it can’t hurt to check.)
Thanks for all the info. I have no comment since I need to watch like 3 youtube videos and spend another hour reading before I really understand that second paragraph, but I will definitely be referring back to it.
What I did pick up was that the kernel actually comes with basic hardware drivers, which is a huge relief. I have pretty standard wifi hardware on standby, so I can try that.
Unity has been getting better press because they mildly walked back a few of their policies. One prominent gamedev channel i saw (games from scratch i think?) did a video praising them for booting out ironsource execs (adware company unity bought a while back) from the company.
And, like clockwork, Unity proves that it was never the plucky underdog that was going to take on the behemoths of unreal and (at the time of inception) cryengine. In fact, it feels like its more hostile to its users than either of its original competitors, that were once known for hostile and expensive features.
And again, im gonna shill for godot. You’re better off using FOSS for your tech stack primarily because of this kind of arbitrary behaviour that becomes standard once you’re too big to be internally accountable.
I know there are a lot of Godot tutorials out there, wondering if there are any you would specifically recommend though? I’ve got a lot of Unity experience but looking to move my personal projects to Godot
I can vouch for Clear Code, as well. That’s where I started and learned to build some 2d platforming games. If you want to get into 3d right away, there is a channel called BornCG that has a very good series on building simple 3d platformer games, too.
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