Oh I’m aware the OS is free. The affordability I was asking for was for the actual computer to run it. I guess that part wasn’t Linux-specific. Mostly just looking for a good option for a work computer that will last a while. Will probably just get some kind of refurb laptop, I’ve always had good success with those.
But if someone has a specific recommendation I’m all ears.
If you are ever going to bring a Linux machine to display evidence, I would suggest going in and testing beforehand. Should be fine but always anticipate failures is my takeaway
The Lenovo Business Laptops always were super strong for me.
A bit on the heavy side (at least on the older models), but build like a tank and has an awesome keyboard.
But any halfway decent Laptop will run Linux fine.
Even UTF-16 used by Windows isn’t fair because it needs twice as much space for hieroglyphs. Won’t someone think of the ancient Egyptians?
Seriously, now that most display systems can handle putting accents on letters instead of needing a code point just for á, a new universal encoding would be nice. Purge it of Unicode’s precomposed letters, duplicated Chinese characters, and duplicated-in-retrospect letters and you could fit another few alphabets into Plane 0.
But convincing tech companies to make webpages bigger seems difficult.
The author is exited but I’m not. I am not a big fan of corporations taking the free work of FOSS developers and turning it into a proprietary dystopia.
I think that having a strong public domain is good for everyone. For instance properties like Sherlock Holmes really took off once it was in the public domain and people could write spin-offs and whatnot without worry that a copyright lawyer would come along and sue them.
Linux is the same thing, Amazon using the kernel and stuff to build an OS on doesn’t take anything away from anyone else who uses Linux as a desktop or server environment, and in fact can lead to some good pass back, even if it is just that the devices are easier to root. Take a look at the Open-wrt project, where Linksys built their router on top of a Linux kernel and it led to a whole ecosystem of open routers. People went out of their way to buy a WRT-42G just with the intent of rooting it, and Linksys got their money either way.
It’s pretty annoying you replied to someone’s nice, well thought out comment with your own bullshit. Then speculated about something you could have googled in 7 seconds max.
Amazon using Linux isn’t the concern. What OP was referring to are things like their use of Elasticsearch. It’s basically Amazon’s version of embrace, extend, extinguish. It got so bad, that the devs of Elasticsearch changed their licensing as a way to fight against Amazon’s tactics.
Open source is great. But when other companies take the open source code as their own to the detriment to the original open source devs, that’s not sustainable. That behaviour will kill open source.
Regarding 4; I suppose you’re looking for the ArcMenu extension if you wish to continue using GNOME as your Desktop Environment (will be abbreviated to DE from here on). Though GNOME’s workflow is considerably different to Windows’. Therefore, you might be interested into looking elsewhere unless you’re actually interested to continue GNOME. FWIW, GNOME is one of the most popular and most polished DEs out there, but it’s very opinionated; which rub some folk the wrong way. I personally like it, but others might differ on this. Lastly, GNOME is NOT particularly known to be light. Therefore, if you’re not happy with how it runs; e.g. frame skips with animations or just high RAM usage overall, then perhaps consider Xfce or Lxqt. If you’re not discontent about the performance on GNOME, then you could also consider KDE or Cinnamon as those might ‘feel’ more ‘modern’ than the aforementioned Xfce and Lxqt.
Regarding 5; Ubuntu gets a lot of hate due to:
how they’re forcing Snaps (their in-house universal package manager; therefore a direct competitor to Flatpak) onto its users. So much so that even attempting to install some packages through apt will result in the Snap being installed instead; which is basically unprecedented within the Linux landscape.
some mishaps in the past resulted in very bad PR; especially to those that are privacy-conscious and/or F(L)OSS-advocates.
You’d have to get to your own conclusions though. It’s probably still the most used distro and therefore you might expect some QoL-features are only found within. If you’re inconclusive, just try it out and consider reporting back to us on how it went. Regarding old hardware; the DE is the most important factor anyways.
Thanks! I think I’ve seen some frame skips, I’ll double check and maybe go with a different DE. And having heard all that, I’ll keep Ubuntu as a last resort.
The overall attitude of the devs regarding user opinions, resulting in the plethora of extensions available, and the tone deaf attitude regarding all of them.
Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They’re not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they’re widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).
They’re also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.
Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.
How so? I miss the old gnome, but I have accepted gnome 3 for what it is. Kde was quite interesting for me back in 2012, but it didn’t perform well with my old setup. What’s new with kde? Id like to give it a try, but I’m too old to break my SO by having both gnome and kde on it.
The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they’ve come a long ways. They’ve also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it’s just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.
Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it’s successful.
The whole mechanism of working of Clonezilla is about the least intuitive I have ever found. So many chances for errors/mistakes, especially if you’re trying to do a network backup. Rescuezilla invokes clonezilla as a backup mechanism, but it saves you all the trouble with a way more intuitive UI. It’s been a revelation to me since I found about it, and refuse to use clonezilla alone.
It’s not open source but I absolutely love Veeam Agent, it will backup an online system with encryption, very easy to use, and they provide a bootable recovery image to restore from.
For opening Word documents, I’d highly recommend OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents originally created in Microsoft Word, and it’s free on Flathub
Another alternative if you have an existing 365 subscription would be the online version of Word in your web browser.
If you’re heavily into the 365 ecosystem though, do note that things like Onedrive compatibility aren’t all the way there on linux, so you’d miss luxuries like right-clicking a file and getting a shareable link, or sending a file to someone directly from the file manager. For these you’ll need to drag-n-drop the file into onedrive, or into your email app to send them.
Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros. Support for opening encrypted PDF files should be flawless too, haven’t had issues with these myself.
Would recommend Linux Mint, or Zorin OS, as both have a pretty similar look and feel when coming from Windows
OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents
It might be decent, but is isn’t “outstanding”, advanced formatting and features sometimes fails. Another thing about OnlyOffice is that it is a web app, it might work fine for smaller documents, however when you’ve to load a 50+ page document scrolling around becomes really bad as you’ll have to scroll and wait 1-2 seconds for each page to load.
Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros
It isn’t “flawlessly”. Forms in PDFs aren’t supported properly.
I have exactly zero experience in what work a law office does, but I would think it’s mostly paperwork and email? If so you can do that at no startup costs.
Pick a distro (pop, mint, whatever), and install libreoffice or one of its many variants for offfice integration.
A common misconception is that linux involves a lot of coding. Sure, it can if you want to - all the hooks for programatical access are there, for example if you want to build shell scripts for automation. But you don’t need to. It’s just an option many linux users, myself included, like to take advantage of.
When it comes to convincing you, all I can say is this: It costs you nothing to try.
Yes, mostly paperwork and email for sure. Some basic spreadsheet stuff for tracking clients and payments and whatnot, but there’s also programs for that.
One less common, yet essential, thing I haven’t gotten a specific response on yet, is converting word docs to PDFs with searchable text. Not sure if you know things about that, but it popped into my head while responding here so hopefully someone who sees this knows something.
And, a generic thank you to everyone who has responded, this has all been very helpful. Even if I don’t respond to you specifically, I appreciate it.
On my distro, hitting print in the Office365 web app autogenerates a searchable pdf. As mentioned by others, it is trivial to generate a searchable pdf from LibreOffice as well.
Since Word documents are one of your bigger concerns, you can download LibreOffice on one of your current machines and try them out. That’s the same program you’d be using on Linux.
It’d have to be a pretty unusual video format to have issues. Similar to above, you can try VLC on Windows and see if there’s any issues.
Based on your description, I’d be surprised if you encountered any major issues. I’d recommend trying either Pop! OS if you’re OK with a slightly different UI from Windows, or Mint if you want something more comfortable. Note that you can create a LiveUSB stick of either of those, or any other distro. You can then boot your computer from it and take it for a spin to see if there’s any obvious issues.
Yeah some counties use pointlessly complicated programs to distribute videos. I often have to try a few different players on windows to find one that works. If VLC has trouble with something, are there others you’d recommend as well?
VLC can pretty much play everything - avi, avi+mjpeg, mov, mpeg, 3gp, flv, you name it. In some cases it can reconstruct corrupted videos and try to play them (typically AVI files)
There’s another player called MPV if you want a second option just in-case though!
VLC usually can handle everything you throw at it. The other popular and capable media player is MPV, though it’s not as user friendly as VLC but has tons of advanced features.
VLC is the sort of software where if it can’t play it, I don’t know what else could. I guess I’d also try the ffmpeg command line tool to see if it can figure out what the video file even is, and maybe it could convert it to a regular format.
Also TBH such a video file would be interesting enough that you could probably post it here (if possible, or any metadata you can extract from it) and see if anyone knows how to play it.
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