You want everything just handed to you or what? You’re asking for cheap, best, and easy. At some point you need to decide what your goal is and accept that you’re going to have to compromise.
Huh? I know exactly what I want that’s why my post was very specific. If you don’t have anything to contribute to the post go outside and take your elitism out on a punching bag.
When I installed ubuntu on my surface go 2 it was as easy as there is good known documentation on it. Only thing is you want to pick up a usb c dock to plug a keyboard along with the installation media. github.com/linux-surface/…/Surface-Go-2
The install was really easy even if sometimes the Surface is a bit difficult to boot on an usb drive. I don’t know why but the Usb drive is easier to boot when using ventoy on it with multiple bootable iso’s on it.
Otherwise everything is easy and I had nothing to do to make it work fine on Fedora.
I just don’t know how the installation process would have been without the typecover (keyboard).
Lately I’ve installed the Linux Surface kernel to improve the mouse bluetooth also.
Open Aegis, go to settings and then disable screen security. (Enabling screen security helps protect against and malicious screen capturing by malware)
From there, it will show your Aegis screen on your PC. It requires ADB access so it depends on if you have that installed or can install it. But the link can get you through that part. :)
I’m replacing a couple of really old PCs at work with slightly less old PCs and I know they don’t meet Windows 11 specs without workarounds. I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work. Otherwise something like open office and a web browser will do what I need. What distro should I start with? I don’t have time to find a perfect fit.
I’d say keep it basic with Ubuntu. It’s not exciting, but it ‘just works’ out of the box and there’s TONs of support if you can’t figure something out.
2nd. Ubuntu is the place to be if you want your best chances for immediate compatibility, and search results will favor your popular configuration if you have issues.
3rd, but I recommend getting the kde variety (used to be called kubuntu). This will give you the most windows like experience. Regular Ubuntu ships with gnome and has a different feel to it.
I’ve been on slackware almost exclusively for 2 decades-ish. I’m team kde. I always liked it, but I had shitty hardware from like 2010 - 2020, so I was on xfce because it’s a lot lighter. But I always had kde installed so I could use some of their native apps.
Probably linux mint. Everything tends to work out of the box and function the way you’d expect. If you’re used to windows then cinnamon will have a familiar feel to it. I like xfce myself, but I move things around to make it feel like windows 95.
Please, don’t use Open Office. Dev essentially halted on it years ago when it was forked o LibreOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. The Open Office project seems to still exist to trick people into using old software.
I’m loving KDE’s Neon distro that’s based off Ubuntu. I’ve not had to do much faffing around to get it the way I want it and anyone that has used Windows should be comfortable using it. KDE Plasma feels very polished and streamlined.
Debian is solid and will come ready with office and web apps. You might want to check out if drivers are available for your printers though. You can always try it out on a live USB.
It needs testing to ensure you get what you need, but I found printer support worked better on Linux for my obscure printer. If you setup a CUPS server then distros will automatically find the networked printers. SUSE/OpenSUSE also has a very good GUI printer admin with lots of automatic setup and auto driver downloads…makes it so easy.
I just have a single network printer I need to access from all of our computers. A Sharp mx-4071’if memory serves. I figured it out on Linux Mint in about 10 minutes so I’m pretty happy with that.
I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work.
In my experience printer support in Linux is generally pretty good. Even when it doesn’t “just work” you usually need only a simple profile file from the manufacturers website that you install.
In general drivers on Linux have been way less painful for me than on Windows; most importantly you don’t need an always-running application for every crappy piece of hardware.
But you still might want to check your printer manufacturer’s website and/or make one prototype Linux PC and try everything out.
With that being said be prepared for users complaining about some workflow changes (that will be bigger with a switch to something like LibreOffice from MSO) and blaming every issue of theirs on Linux and you.
I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.
For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: cid-doc.github.io for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.
I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.
This may be a controversial opinion but I would rather use the web version of Outlook than Evolution. I have been trying to use Evolution since the Ximian days but I was never really happy with it. I gave up on it in favour of web Outlook a couple of years ago.
I remember back in 2017, I didn’t really need any big desktop apps anymore. All I used was Salesforce, Netsuite, O365, Postman… I asked my company to just give me a Chromebook. Now I hate Chromebooks and I could very much do my job on a Linux distro mainly using web apps if needed.
My IT dept would never allow it because they can’t install security software on it. Obviously I’d be pretty safe from malware, but they’d have to trust that I set up firewalls and password protection because they couldn’t enforce a group policy, and their data loss prevention tools wouldn’t work.
Not as “safe” as you think in that regard (I use arch btw), the reason they don’t want it is because you lose control as the administrator. Once everyone is running some flavour of Linux and people report problems, guess who’s gotta look at it? The IT department. It’s a management nightmare compared to windows.
I solved that by social engineering our IT to join my “Windows” computer into the domain, which was actually just a Windows VM. They didn’t notice, and I’m free to Linux away.
“By default it displays kanji as Chinese characters” Not quite sure what you mean by that
Edit: my bad, I read the other comment’s link and had not encountered the issue yet. Wish you luck to solve this
I think it’s pure luck what font does your OS prefer, I was using Pop_OS and it defaulted to Japanese, but I think it’s more common to default to Chinese because of the population size.
I was using a similar guide, and it also talked about the locale.gen, but that file was never to be found, I just searched a bit more into that and this popped up. So it seems Fedora handles things differently, but now I’m unsure what commands to execute since I’m not sure the ones in that thread are also valid for me.
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