State governments usually are required to place all of their computers up for sale through surplus. (Hard drives usually removed and destroyed). I have been through that process at a State College and a University. They aren’t just thrown away. I imagine there is a similar process for federal computer.
Yeah, when access to raspberry pi’s and such was none existant I knew a few people who would pick up old Optiplex computers and such to use as media servers and such. Old dells used to be very reliable. Throw whatever distro on there gui or not, and the shitty graphics cards wouldn’t matter much
Literally just talked to my mother-in-law who was talking about throwing out her laptop because Windows 10 is losing support and she can’t upgrade to Windows 11.
It would probably run linux perfectly.
But I would never put linux on it. I am not doing tech support for my MIL who just admitted to me that she “locked down her machine because she fixed the registry issues windows has and turned on ipv6 on her router” and alluded to changing other settings but she cant understand why her “wifi keeps dropping out” and thinks its because the neighbors installed a ring doorbell.
A lot of businesses. I’ve stocked an entire network lab out of waste bins from buildings with tech companies in them. Laptops, monitors, network gear, cabling. I once scored a whole box of 100W USB-C chargers.
Aah yes, appimage, flatpak, snaps, progressive web apps, electron apps… The cross-compatibility of the lazy 21st century developer, where a simple IRC-like chat client comes with an entire operating system or an entire browser (which itself is an entire operating system too nowadays), takes up half a gig of disk space, and starts up in over 10 seconds with a multi-gigahertz multicore CPU.
It’s been that way since the dawn of computing. Developers will push hardware to its limits and the hardware people will keep making a faster chip. A lot of software was laggy as hell back in the day. Not to mention, it didn’t have any features compared to the stuff now. Plus our shit would crash all the time and take down the whole PC. Sure, you run across some shockingly fast and good apps but those have always been few and far between.
LMAO the clickbait delusion… has anybody not learnt for how long people stuck to Windows XP and 7? 10 is incomparably more secure and robust than 7 was, and 11 is almost a meaningless cosmetic upgrade. People that do not want to, will not use Linux, and keep using 10. Comfort and compatibility take precedence over security and privacy. People that do install Linux, however, will still want to keep 10 or 11 separately installed, and Microsoft officially suggests workaround to install 11 on any computers.
An alternative to Kubuntu is TuxedoOS (similar to PopOS (Gnome) but for KDE). You can also try KDE Neon.
You can use VM to install and try new distro, worst case you make a new VM and start again.
For learning, if it was me I would just roll with Arch, using distro like Garuda that has BTRFS rollback or even EndeavourOS. A fuck up can be saved from BTRFS rollback, back up dual boost or 2nd pc.
I’m not sorry that the CIA is using your closed-source software you mistakenly thought you owned anything because you paid way too much for anyone else to actually control your shit, you ignorant slave.
Edit: You’re a bunch of ignorant fuckwads. You can’t read shit and know who’s on what side because your sensitive to sarcasm and blatant…nevermind. Fuck off.
There’s a channel “learnlinuxtv” on YouTube that is pretty good. I haven’t looked in a while but I watched their entire course on proxmox. They also create books.
In my experience, every computer is faster with Linux than with Windows. But if this measures just the processor performance on similar tasks I guess it’s news.
Consequently battery life tends to suffer on Linux vs windows. Especially on newer hardware before people figure out how to manage performance and battery life.
Usually, applying the same tricks that Windows does, its not true.
But by default, mostl Linux ditros dont do something special for having performance managing.
But actually. Windows does neither, at least the pure Vanilla form. Its a huge difference when using my Levono Ideapad with the preinstalled Windows versus Windows that is reinstalled Vanilla without drivers. Then Linux is more plug and play and better at this job than Windows.
Maybe they do it differently on ideapads. But on all of the modern thinkpads I own the all install at set up the same power profiles and dynamic tuning that the factory image does. Factory install vs fresh install performance is the same on these machines once windows update has done it’s thing. Even the random POS HPs will do the same thing.
I think it comes down to the culture. A minuscule improvement to a file system is big news in the Linux community. There’s also lots of academic interest in the performance critical parts of the kernel that you just can’t emulate with a closed source model. Is anyone writing papers on how to obtain a 2% improvement in the task scheduler on Windows?
Linux dominates the server market, so even small improvements matter when you’re talking about a server farm with thousands of machines or the latest supercomputer. Many, many people care about the scalability of Linux. On Windows, we say: NTFS? It’s good enough. The user won’t notice on modern SSDs.
A lot of the software components under the hood in Linux are replaceable.
So you have a bunch of different CPU and disk IO schedulers to suit different workloads, the networking stack and memory management can be tweaked to hell and back, etc etc.
When installing gnome using apt it should prompt you at some point which display manager (aka login screen) you want to use. Just choose the one that’s not gdm and your login screen wont change. Generally its easy to install a new desktop. Just do “sudo apt install the_desktop_environment” and change the chosen desktop environment on your login screen when logging in (there should be some slider or button for that).
if you’re trying out one or more than one DE I suggest making a new user for it, I’ve accidently messed up my dotfiles more times while DE hopping than I’d like to recall
is there an easy way to transfer files from user to user? is there a way to delete other users easily? i will definitely do this, so thanks for the suggestion! do you know any resources about this i could consult?
as a root user you can move files around no problem, I’m sure there’s desktop environment hopping articles to refer to, deleting is pretty straightforward too. for my case when I added i3 and hyprland I just tried flipping between the different desktops on a new user to see if anything broke before doing it on my main account, just something I have a habit of doing after some old mishaps
hyprland has this, but you have to configure it. It’s called Submaps. Some other tiling window managers/compositors (notion for example) have it too, but not to that extent. (notion can be enhanced by Lua scripting, tho.)
The idea is, after the first key of the sequence the meaning of a set of keys change. You could configure those to change the meanings again etc until you finally reach whatever depth you wanted and it performs an action.
However, be warned that hyprland is currently developed by very elitist people who like to support onky a very small set of distributions (primarily Arch btw) and have not much interest in other peoples Ubuntu shenanigens and the likes. It is extremely hard to install in Ubuntu and similar, requiring you to do minor edits to build scripts and source code in multiple languages and finding required library versions from build errors that do not mention them.
Ask your Linux group. Seriously. They should know best what kinds of issues their ‘users’ frequently face and what kind of information there is.
I learned Linux by doing. Set up a webserver, set up a network share, assemble a RAID with 2 old HDDs. Install Steam and play around a bit. Try LaTex and write your next homework assignment with it. Set up a Python / R / C++ development environment. All of that is good practice and you’ll understand the concepts and specific issues once you do it yourself. Imho that’s better than a theoretical course. You can do this in VMs or find old hardware. Some people in such groups have good connections.
Also a university library should have some free (for you) material (books) on Linux.
Thanks. Yeah I spent some time with it and drew some finite-state machines with TikZ(?), other diagrams, we assembled a few physics homework assignment scripts to tidy the data from experiments, do linear regression and generate beautiful diagrams. It also taught me a bit about typesetting and proper formatting. I ‘wasted’ quite some time with it but a homework assignment in TeX looks almost like a scientific paper. Depending on the later career it’s a good skill to have. And I still prefer writing stuff with that instead of fighting LibreOffice. YMMV, since I also like programming and prefer text and the command line over GUIs.
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