I’ve worked with lawyers a bit in an IT role so I’ll put it bluntly. Don’t bother.
Why? You have to ensure complete compatibility with Microsoft Office standards in your job and you may also need to access third-party systems especially document management systems on a regular basis. These things require Windows. It’s a sad fact of life that your colleagues being able to read your documents and ensure consistent layout is more important than anything else.
Yes, you can try Libre Office and soforth. However, the moment the court staff, other lawyers or anybody else gets a jumbled mess you’re going to cause yourself more problems than it’s worth. Even you yourself need to be able to ensure compatibility when it comes to information storage and retrieval too.
Windows licences are essentially free with your devices anyway and the cost of Office is a couple of hundred bucks top. Money might be tight but losing information from your court cases could put you out of business.
Sorry Linux fanboys, but Windows is the superior option here as much as I wish it was not. It’s simply the best tool for the job.
First: windows isn’t the superior option. This is basically windows being VHS, Linux being betamax. Linux is vastly superior, but it’s just that Microsoft marketing is too good at lying.
Second: Linux is very apt at running Microsoft programs, including office.
Third: fuck Microsoft office, use online office in a browser. Microsoft office 365 if you’re dumb (because my god, it’s cringy bad, or google docs if you want it easy (eats most Ms crap with little to no trouble) or if you want to go truely open source, setup nextcloud with only office.
Side comment: if governments or courts FOCRE you to pay money to a specific company to use services that can quite easily be done by open source alternatives then I say that smells like corruption and or incompetence.
About your side comment - It isn’t necessarily that they’re being forced to use Office. It’s more that office is the standard that everyone else is using, and therefore the standard everyone expects to work with. If anything breaks or displays incorrectly, it becomes your fault for not using the standard.
To be clear, I hate Microsoft and their monopoly, and the blaming I just described as well. It definitely happens though. Same reason most of Gen Z uses iPhones: if you have an Android phone any problem with phones/chatting suddenly becomes your fault, even if the underlying reason is actually because of Apple.
But that’s the point: it’s NOT a standard and government or justice departments should require open standards so that EVERYONE can participate because everyone MUST participate. Now the government at least allows the defacto forced sponsoring of a single damn near monopoly. Want to use the government? Sorry, gotta pay your Microsoft taxes first. That is not okay, not acceptable. There are loads of open standards that can be and should be used and enforced
Like or not, it’s a de facto standard. Good luck trying to convince your colleagues to change their workflow.
I love Linux, but I would never recommend using Microsoft Office on Linux especially if you work in a collaborative environment. Saying that Linux can run Microsoft office without any issue is a blatant lie. I run virtual machines basically so I can run Microsoft Office, but I don’t think everyone wants to go though that much hassle.
You are right in everything except that it’s absolutely not the superior option in OPs situation. A lawyer has to guarantee that a document is identical and recallable in its exact form even years from now and the only way to absolutely ensure this is using Office itself.
Furthermore, most law firms use and have to access other parties document management systems and the thick clients for these with all the features only run on Windows. Screwing around with WINE to get these maybe working isn’t worth the hassle for a time-poor lawyer with cases to work on.
Computers are just another tool in the box when it comes to your business and you should use the best version of it to get the job done. It’s simply only Windows in OPs case here that’s the viable option. It might be corruption or vendor lock in or whatever but there’s no point trying to fight it in this scenario.
TLDR: Ubuntu Pro offers additional security patches to packages found in the universe repo. Universe is community maintained so Ubuntu is essentially stepping in to provide critical CVE patches to some popular software in this repo that the community has not addressed.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it but I don’t really see this as withholding patches. Software in this repo would otherwise be missing these patches and it’s a ton of work for Ubuntu to provide these patches themselves.
Now is they move glibc to universe and tell me to subscribe to get updates I’ll feel differently.
Debian includes ffmpeg, for example, in the main stable repo. Given Debian’s reputation, I would think they are including these security patches in a timely manner, though I’m not entirely sure how to compare specific patches to verify this.
Of course, everything changes when you are selling support contracts. Canonical and Red Hat are the big two for enterprise because they provide support.
When I was last running Ubuntu on desktop, I signed up for an account and enabled these extra security updates. Yeah, it’s “free”, but it requires jumping through hoops. Requiring an account to get patches is the kind of user-hostile design pattern I expect from Apple or Google, but not in the desktop Linux world.
Debian’s contrib repo, which is the equivalent of Ubuntu’s universe repo, doesn’t get security updates from the Debian security team, as it’s not considered an official part of Debian. Package maintianers have to provide security updates. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib
The difference is that Ubuntu provide paid support for contrib packages, including patches. Debian doesn’t have any official paid support options.
Nobody else has this hybrid model. RHEL is a paid distro in general. Most others are just free entirely. They all patch CVEs when they can. Ubuntu doesn’t write all of their patches or anything.
Lets see if I got this right, you (the OP), the creator of Louvre, managed to create an example compositor that looks like a better desktop experience than the entire KDE and GNOME teams could ever develop with their infinite wisdom and funding? Fucking amazing. :)
I know this is an example, but seriously following the “copy apple down to the last pixel” approach you should consider creating a DE for Linux that doesn’t have themes or any user tweaks, just a simple and pixel-perfect copy of macOS. The problem with GNOME and KDE is that they both fail in simple design principals such as proportions, item spacing and whatnot while Apple, and you by extension, excels in that aspect.
Furthermore my personal opinion is that GNOME tries to reinvent everything and ends up fucking things up and creating situations like the lack of desktop icons going into the activities view by default etc. KDE however does some other stuff right but they fail really badly in terms of proportions and item spacing. Their taskbar is also a shame, for a group that says they want to copy Windows’ style they aren’t doing that well.
Desktop experiences when it comes to design peaked with macOS Monterey (after that Apple did changes to the settings that are still not polished) and in terms of usability they peaked with the release of Exposé, Spaces and later their integration on Mission Control (initially bad but now they seem better).
If you do create a 1:1 copy of macOS desktop experience (and keep it updates) as a new DE you’ll most likely become very popular in no time. It doesn’t need themes, customization and all the personalization that would make it really hard to create, just a simply pixel perfect copy of macOS.
Thanks! While I may have nailed server-side decorations in that example, as you know, there is too much other stuff to take into account to make a DE actually functional. So, I respect a lot what KDE and GNOME do and the innovations they make. I actually want to create a macOS clone, hahaha. That is one of the reasons I started this project. I will soon continue working on a library for exposing global menus in Wayland/X11. Qt allows defining a custom platform plugin, enabling us to plug external systems for managing global menus. Sadly, I think GTK4 no longer supports that, so I believe an approach would be to display a standard menu with basic functions for apps that don’t support it.
Ohh, that’s cool. How far do you want to go with this? I had the idea of using a custom wayland protocol to make per-app global menus instead of per-window so you can have an app open without any windows, like on macOS, in the compositor I wanted to write. However writing a compositor using wlroots is still incredibly difficult if you have no prior experience so the whole thing didn’t get very far yet. If that’s something you want to do too, I’d be very interested in this.
(Speaking of, why did you decide not to build this on top of wlroots?)
I actually already created a library for that called Heaven (github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Heaven), but I want to rewrite it to make it simpler and add backends for different IPC mechanisms (Unix domain sockets and D-Bus).
It allows apps to create as many menu bars as they want. The idea is that when one of its toplevel windows is activated, it can notify the “topbar app” to display a specific menu bar. The compositor also informs the “topbar app” about the currently active client. So, it has three APIs: one for apps, another for the “topbar app,” and another for the compositor. Apps are identified by their PID.
Now, with respect to the second question, a long time ago, I tried to create a compositor using QtWayland, which had the most documentation at that time. However, it had some problems with certain interfaces that made the compositor crash. So, I then looked for wlroots but could find no documentation whatsoever, so I decided to start from scratch. As time passed, I began to learn and understand how protocols work, realizing that one of the most challenging things was implementing protocols correctly, as there are too many interfaces that depend on each other, and you need to implement them all before you can see results and validate that it works. That’s why I decided to create this lib, even as my university thesis, with the focus of offering a default and basic implementation of each protocol so that developers can see a functional compositor from the start and then gradually and specifically override whatever they need, being able to validate each feature they add immediately. Of course, there are many other complicated things I had to learn, such as the DRM/KMS API, buffer sharing through DMA, among other stuff. I really appreciate wlroots, though. I learned a lot by analyzing its source code, and surely today I would be able to create a compositor with it, hahaha.
It seems like a lot of the folk here could be pretty interested in the revival of the Fedora Audio Creation Special Interest Group, as it could become a real powerhouse when it comes to getting more people involved into music creation with Linux.
I use dash to dock but I keep it hidden and make it the same size. It’s just nice to be able to go down to click open apps sometimes. I still rarely use it but it’s nice to have
I would look for a dongle that specifically markets itself as being Raspberry Pi compatible. Most stuff you find will prioritize Windows, but if it’s marketed to work with the Pi you know it’ll have at least some level of Linux compatibility. Once you find one, try to figure out what chipset it uses, then search if it’s supported by a handful of the distros you wanna try.
I just bought a OnePlus 6 to test out mobile Linux and it’s not there yet. Firefox it a pain to use and it doesn’t auto rotate either. So far it’s been good to read manga on and… Ye that’s about it. Camera doesn’t work on it and the UI still isn’t the best. I haven’t used KDE’s DE for phones yet but I’ve used phosh and now I’m using gnome mobile and so far gnome mobile is a lot better but still buggy. I’m excited for the future development of it but with how locked down phones are it’s a bleak future
I use Geary and it works well. Just go into settings and allow it to check for notifications when app is closed. It’ll run and the background and I’ll get the notification then just open up thunderbird to actually check it
I disagree. Someone who isn’t willing to try Linux on their own, or otherwise investigate, just because they’re curious is not ready for the baggage that comes with a new OS. Agreeing with another comment: don’t make this change at the same time as other major changes to your career. That is a recipe for disaster.
I’m a Mac / Linux guy who dislikes Windows. I wouldn’t even suggest getting a Mac at the same time as making huge career changes. And Linux is harder. Not impossible, but no training-wheels. You want something new, but you aren’t really interested in Linux itself.
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