My guess is that somebody has some important “Windows” application that they need to run that is calling into Cygwin. That means that the proper way to run it on Linux is almost certainly just to port it from Cygwin to Linux native. How do you do this though if somebody else wrote the code?
I recently picked up an older MS Surface model and it has been really good. I don’t know where tablet bleeds into 2in1, but it’s a tablet that has a magnetic keyboard that pops on and off and accepts USB connections for stuff like mice with a USB to USB-C adapter or via a surface dock. Prices start at around $70 on ebay for older models in decent condition and run up to around $2k for the highest end models directly from Microsoft. Being x86 they accept any compatible OS (including Linux) and installs just as easy as any laptop (minus the later models that need the touch driver installed manually on Linux or a Windows re-install). If you go with a surface and buy an older model make sure you get 8gb of ram instead of 4.
As far as setup goes, I went with Gnome, enabled the on screen keyboard, then added the “custom hot corners” Gnome plugin to get a working on screen keyboard everywhere (without the plugin it only works in Gnome and Gnome apps). Afterwards (since I went with an older model that didn’t need the touch drivers) it’s fully ready for use like any other device.
There’s also the PineTab2, though from the sounds of it it’s not really ready to be used as a tool, more so just for development and experimentation. I did find two good blog posts about it’s state when researchign devices which would be worth reading if you were considering buying a PineTab2 and wanted to know what to expect:
Did you use the linux-surface-kernel? This project is awesome for getting as many functions of a surface running as possible. There are lots of useful information and tipps for every surface model too.
I’m on the standard LTS kernel (if I properly remember Debian defaults). I did check out the Linux Surface project before setting it up, though the standard kernal and Gnome config seems to work great out of the box. Even little things like the gyroscope and automatic brightness worked from the start, though it probably varies from model to model.
Edit: only thing that didn’t work out of the box is the camera. Going to tinker around with that at some point, not a super high priority personally but still nice to have.
See, that’s the situation where we just don’t use them. I’m talking about wiping the original OS and putting something that’s really FOSS in its place.
I have a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 gen 6, with 3k display, i7 13370H and a 53 Wh battery. The battery life is… not so great. After watching a 2 hour movie with an external full HD display, the battery loses around 30/40%. Using the laptop display, it would be more than 50%. The average battery life is around 4 hours, but if you tweak the parameters with Tuxedo Control Center, turning off some cores and the fans, and lowering the CPU frequency, it can last more than 6 hours. I feel like this model, with a new CPU and a bigger battery (almost doubled!), should do much better.
I just have new Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 gen 8, same display but i7-13700H and 99Wh batt. The battery is like 8+ hours normal office work.
Just as I bought it they announced new Pulse 14 with 60Wh battery, but that seems more energy efficient components, I wonder how good it would perform.
I have an older InfinityBook and a slightly less older Pulse. What I hate about both is the noise. The fucking fans are so incredibly annoying. Also they are not just loud, they scale up in weird steps (not linear) making it seem like something’s attacking.
In consequence I use it with throttled CPU most of the time, but then even the desktop can become laggy.
Theoretically it’s nice hardware, practically I won’t get another.
My model (the InfinityBook Pro 6) has two fans: when they ramp up they are clearly noticeable, but I don’t think they are that annoying. I feel like the noise is acceptable and justified by the laptop’s thinness, but that’s just my perception and it could be that the thermal department has changed through the generations.
I have an InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 7, with the RTX 3050 Ti laptop, 2x2TB SSD, Intel i7-12700H and I believe also a 53 Wh battery (did not go for the battery edition with increased capacity, but instead the storage edition).
Even when using the integrated Intel GPU, the battery life is quite bad. With any kind of browser activity, I get about 2-2.5 hours. If I only do reading in Zotero with dark mode, I get up to 5 hours. For my use case, it is fine, but I could not have used this if I was dependent on working with no access to a power outlet.
Otherwise I am quite happy with Tuxedo though, and their support is usually very good. I hope they will succeed long term if they can also continue to improve on their products.
Basically nothing comes close to macbooks with apple silicon. Even the best amd cpu like 7840u with big battery, lcd screen and no dedicated gpu will still only manage around 6 to 8 hours usage. And that’s with it being clocked down to the slow as balls setting.
I actually need to send it in for repair - I think the GPU is fucked as I get irregular crashes where the screen(s) all go black, audio keeps playing but input is broken, and other weird things, like sometimes an external monitor flickers and shifts so the left third is actually shown on the right hand side of the screen…
If you don’t want to get them from microsoft, you can purchase a license elsewhere. Microsoft allows them to be distributed freely as long as the files are not modified. That’s why they are always packaged in an executable installer.
Those fonts are not free. They may be just ttf files, but there is a massive amount of work that goes into creating a font with unicode support. If you just want fonts for basic compatibility, you can use open source fonts with compatible metrics such as the Liberation fonts or use the microsoft core fonts that haven’t been updated in 20 years.
Many fonts have a license that allows them to be embedded in a pdf. Newer fonts usually have a flag that tells the software if the font can be embedded or not, not all software respects that flag though. Older fonts don’t have the flag and will embed even if you are not allowed to embed them.
Thanks for the info! So the entire .ttf package is embedded, or every single character as SVG? Damn that sounds like a waste of space compared to HTML where fonts with alternatives and fallback also work.
zorin is sorta the opposite of what you ask. its a distro that seeks to emulate windows and its functionality. then also it makes it as out of the box as possible. so it has pretty much any application you need preinstalled including wind along with play on linux so you can install windows things pretty easily.
IMO, the best distro is going to be whatever you’re most comfortable with (given it’s still getting updates blah blah blah). Some might be easier in the get go but if they do wonky things (compared to what you’re used to) an update might really screw you up and leave you in a situation where you’re doing a lot of research.
For the most part, you can make any distro do whatever you want, but if you understand one much better than the rest, use that.
Video formats? There literally are VLC, ffmpeg and MPV. Every normal format works on every Distro.
Get most apps from Flathub.org, use any Distro you want but I recommend Fedora Kinoite.
Word documents for sure, PDF editing actually too. PDF editing is cursed in itself, but Okular + PDF arranger + Firefox + sometimes GIMP (for actually censoring) work.
Have a look at Stirling PDF, a project combining all of these effords. Its not yet a fully graphical desktop app but this command will work on Fedora Kinoite:
zorin os is an out of the box distro that will have all the applications from the start and maximum windows look, feel, and compatibility. https://zorin.com/os/
Linux is stable if you use a distro that’s known to be stable, example: Linux mint. This is one of the “just works” distros. There are a couple, but I highly recommend mint. Linux can do all of what you need done, from documents, PDFs to viewing all kinds of videos. I’ve never once run into any issue doing any of that. You have libreoffice and onlyoffice that have amazing compatibility with MS office. If anything, you can use the MS office suite online and call it a day. Hell, you can use Google’s office suite, too. PDFs? Zero worries. Videos are good, too. We do have VLC which basically plays anything you throw at it. However, since you have a business and want to make sure things always work, I do recommend that you keep at least one windows machine in the office for just in case. I don’t have a business, but I’ve always had this one laptop that runs windows. I debloated the shit out of it. Blocked all of the telemetry using Microsoft’s own firewall and it’s sitting there for just in case.
Edit: forgot to mention that you are always welcome to come here and ask if you needed help. I find the Lemmy Linux community to be extremely helpful. Everyone jumps in to help every time I had a question.
Frankly, that’s the reason – the original reason, and the most important – to use Free Software. With very few exceptions, the origin story of every Free Software project was somebody getting fed up with a piece of proprietary software either abusing them or just not doing what they wanted it to do. In fact, the entire Free Software movement itself was invented in the first place because Richard Stallman got fed up with Xerox’s bullshit back in the day!
So yeah, there you go: that’s the only reason you need, and you already knew it.
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