I try my best to look for open source alternatives. If a company does not support Linux, they don’t deserve my support as someone who has only used linux for almost 5 years now. Luckily I am not dragged all the way up into many of these ecosystems which don’t work on Linux
I already used open source programs on Windows. The programs I’m using to do all my work with are Krita, Blender 3D, Gimp, and Libre Office.
They either started out on Linux or support Linux natively, so switching to Linux didn’t really change any of the programs I use. The biggest change is playing games, but Valve has made it very pain free.
Does this mean I can stop setting MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND?
Or is it just enabling the compilation of Wayland sections (which I thought happened a while ago?)
I’m not sure which programs you’re using so hopefully something here can help but here’s some stuff I’ve read/done:
For MS Office, I believe you can just use it in your web browser or use LibreOffice as an alternative.
If you use anything Adobe-based, you’ll probably have to keep a Windows partition around or find an alternative. I haven’t seen anything for running Adobe in WINE or WINE-based tools and I’m not sure if Adobe functions in a virtual machine or not.
Most gaming-related issues can be dealt with via Proton (Steam’s compatibility tool). I’ve successfully gotten just about every game I play to run in Proton, with the only issues being EA’s launcher (the game still launches though).
If you have any specific programs that you have questions about, feel free to ask. Hope this helps!
You can’t be sold on Linux. Anyone ‘sold on’ or ‘lead to’ Linux isn’t going to stick with it. The desire to learn to use and be productive with Linux is purely an internal one. Selling you on it would be like trying to push you into a religion. For this, you need to sell yourself on Linux. Install it, run it, make it your daily system for a few weeks or months… then you can decide if it is for you. The questions you’ll need to find answers to are, but not limited to:
Will it run the software I need? You mention PDF’s… Viewing non-encrypted PDF’s is no problem. For encrypted PDF forms that I’ve seen from some government sites, I needed Windows or Mac to fill them out reliably. I was able to do some within Wine, but that wasn’t stable enough to depend on.
Be aware there are desktop choices. Linux comes in many flavours, some can present and work similar to a Windows desktop workflow, some more similar to Mac (but not quite), and some are just either heritage UNIX styles or just Linux unique. Finding what you prefer can take some trial and effort.
I suggest Linux distributions that offer disk encryption (and be sure to use it). If you were my lawyer, I wouldn’t want the documents we share to be left around un-encrypted anywhere.
Check out some Linux periodicals, as well. They can help wet your whistle with reviews on various Linux distributions and often some introductory articles on software and How-To’s. If that kind of thing interests you, you’ve already half sold yourself on Linux.
Yup, that or if buying new then check out older models that may be in clearance/sale. You don’t need something with a 4070 etc to run Linux, but you could potentially manage to find something with an older-gen video card and decent/upgradeable RAM. There should also be more easily found discussion over Linux compatibility
With laptops, also watch out for models with soldered-on RAM or low maximums, which can limit upgrades.
Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them
Podman is getting worse, for instance they recently deprecated systemd generate and tell you to use Quadlet, for running pods, you need to use Kubernetes. This greatly complicates my workflow.
SELinux, while secure, and easy to troubleshoot with Cockpit, is a major pain in the ass that prevents most containers from accessing their data directories. It can be corrected but is extremely frustrating.
Quadlet is extremely inconsistent, I can copy the working unit file for a container and it works, change the name and variables for another container, and one launches but the other won’t start. One will have the wrong name. Stupid things, like putting the name in quotes, reloading, removing the quotes fixes it. I have harsh words for the idiot who deprecated systemd generate.
something like Tiddlywiki, their documentation will put you in /var/www but Fedora uses /usr/www or something. You get used to the Fedora things but you can end up on a goose chase sometimes.
Those cons are starting to hit hard, and when I reimage this server next I’m probably going to Proxmox or Debian. Server 37 was good but I probably won’t bother with 39.
Fedora uses /var/www. Dunno what gonk you read or told you otherwise. There’s SELinux policies built in for that directory. You probably are confusing the default html files at /usr/share/html. These are separated intentionally. The /usr/share/html directory is managed by RPM, the other /var/www is content designated as web server files.
Linux is vastly superior. I’ve been on Linux desktop for over 20 years now, I’ll never go back.
As a typical example: this weekend I install Linux (with download and making iso) takes 20 minutes, I install windows (first time in decades, something for my son), took fucking 6 hours, 14 attempts, loads of problem searching on internet.
Having said that, there are some things to keep in mind. Linux mostly (to users) is slightly different on a few details, and because of Microsoft, there are some things to keep in mind.
You’re a lawyer, so you might have to deal with Microsoft documents. Those you can process with LibreOffice (I don’t like it very much, like Microsoft office), google drive (works very nice, but is still closed source, google) or your own hosted linux server with nextcloud and only office (a bit harder to setup but then it’s all yours and under your control)
Look into any closed source windows applications that are required. Most windows programs run also under Linux (wine, proton, and these days various other solutions up to a virtual machine with windows for those few exceptions that won’t work on Linux for some reason)
Video formats are non-issue, Linux eats everything and mostly out of the box.
Then, Linux has distributions. See it as different car brands. They’re all cars, based on the same tech, just different brand names that do details slightly different. You gotta choose a distro (distribution). I HIGHLY recommend either fedora or (my person Lal preference) a Ubuntu variant. I personally have been using kubuntu for over a decade now. The graphical user interface works mostly like windows (just better) and most programs have Ubuntu ready Linux versions available, making installing them super easy. Install VirtualBox (free, as usual) to run windows in a virtual machine if needed, and setup multiple desktops so that you can easily switch to a windows desktop when needed (hopefully, and likely, never)
I’m a selfhoster, I setup a home assistant VM and Cosmos Cloud running a bunch of Docker containers, all setup using Cockpit.
Easier, and better looking UI than Proxmox. Also this setup enabled me to use Docker instead of LXD and save on one virtualization layer, which as a beginner every layer adds complexity.
It has been rock solid, it has better hardware support than Debian due to the faster release cycle, only drawback is the lack of documentation or tutorials in comparison to Debian which has a colossal community.
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