Somehow unrelated to what this video proposes, Linux has taught and gave me so many possibilities that I would never, ever be able to if I (still) were using Windows to this very day. In other words… thanks to Linux, I can now operate and have fun in a under 3W device.
Why bother with Windows? Mostly the same reasons moving from Windows to a Mac can be a pain, however on macOS you get better professional software support and less reasons to virtualize Windows from time to time. To be fair, what’s the point of using X operating system if some of the tools you need require a virtual machine or you’ve to use alternatives that are sub-par, will make you waste time and have a worse experience. Again even under macOS with Microsoft’s own MS Office for Mac things sometimes aren’t as compatible as they should be.
Linux desktop is great, I love it but I don’t sugar coat it nor I’m delusional like most posting about it. Here is a list of cases that aren’t easy to deal in Linux:
People who need the real MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;
Designers who use Adobe apps that won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays;
People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
Electrical engineers: Circuit Design Suite (Multisim and Ultiboard) are primarily designed for Windows. Alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA may work in some cases but they aren’t great if you’ve to collaborate with others who use Circuit Design Suite;
Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won’t make drivers and software for Linux;
Architects: AutoCAD isn’t available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don’t cut it if you’ve to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.
If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
Also, the guys take on “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” when it comes to DE is total BS. What usually happens is that you’ll eventually find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components and installing them on KDE will simply give you small issues here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or simply create a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components.
Im curious about your WINE comment, because you can go into the dialog that selects which version of Windows it “emulates”. The drop down has what looks like every release of windows back to DOS.
As for can’t collaborate, that depends on the industry. Teamcenter PLM and Siemens NX CAD work on both RHEL and SUSE desktop. When W10 came out it made those programs less performant so I switched to OpenSUSE and installed the NX CAD to get performance back.
WINE comment, because you can go into the dialog that selects which version of Windows it “emulates”.
Until the emulation fails at some basic Window API feature like window tabs with multiple rows that any Windows version from 95 does just fine. Or… until you try to get MS Office 2016 working and it requires dozens of hacks to end up with something very slow to startup and have graphical glitches… or 2019 also not working, or not being able to install 2021. Or… until you find out that Wine is still unable to just tell applications the screen size fucking up everything that depends on it. Wine is far from perfect and it isn’t that good.
As for can’t collaborate, that depends on the industry
Yes, you are lucky you got NX CAD for Linux, because for most people that’s not the case. Adobe products are a no go, AutoCAD is a no go, same goes for Multisim / Ultiboard.
WINE doesn’t emulate it translates the code so that it can run natively, so any problem you have is because you haven’t installed the windows dependencies of the program you are trying to run which you can do trough winetricks. And wine comes with a configuration tool called winecfg, and on there you can edit the window scaling, wine can in fact tell apps to screensize up
In the cold and desolation; the mad wizard had been eeking out his existence letting the wild know about the horrors that awaited them in Redmondland.
But few listened
Then slowly the kings of Redmondland began to become more crazed in their power; wanting more and more from their subjects. Until a few, a small band of subjects took off their blinders and released the kingdom had spread so far that the mad wizard Linus was in their midst.
They stopped and listened to him
They grew tired of telling the king about everything they did and needing his permission to do anything in their own lives.
The mad wizard wasn’t crazy… he was just upset; it was the king who’d gone mad wanting to control his kingdom…
you will likely find that most people will disagree with that, the general consensus of a “Linux distro” is that gnu/linux stuff. Personally I would consider it distros in which the apps would mostly use the general linux runtime stacks since musl based distros I would still consider a general linux distro. Android uses it’s own distinct runtime, for the vast majority of usage, and although using things like termux we can get close, how android is setup it lacks a good chunk of things that can only be resolved with a chroot/proot
I don’t need to find people in agreement, just as I don’t need to find out whether people agree with the Earth being round or flat. Sometimes a fact is just a fact.
If you want to argue whether something like Alpine Linux that builds upon musl instead of GNU’s libc is a Linux distribution or not, please take that discussion there. I merely wanted to give OP a suggestion what should work best with his laptops.
I think it’s worth keeping in mind since when people ask for something, they generally want something specific. in this case they asked for a distro, so there is a non insiginificant chance they wanted a “generally agreed upon distro”
Everyone talking it’s bad but I think it’s not, I mean you got another key for shortcut to anything you want after uninstall that crap it’s useless anyway
I constantly check out dell refurbished for deals on workstations. Pretty good Linux compatibility in my experience, workstation hardware, and they have 50% deals all the dang time. The precision line of workstations looks like it would meet your needs.
I’m still convinced the Dell Refurbished website isn’t real. Like why do they even bother selling crappy Celeron and Pentium systems when this website exists?
Issue is with the space in “New Volume”, I bet. Should likely be /media/lucky/New\ Volume
Or, I vaguely remember having to add like \040 or something in place of the space. I’ve dealt with this in the past… And found it easier to use a “-” instead of a space… Or no space at all, obviously.
About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.
Using any UI application as root is a bigger risk. That’s because every UI toolkit loads plugins and what not from all over the place and runs the code from those plugins (e.g. plugins installed system wide and into random places some environment variables point to). Binary plugins get executed in the context of the application running and can do change every aspect of your program. I wrote a small image plugin to debug an issue once that looked at all widgets in the UI and wrote all the contents of all text fields (even those obfuscated to show only dots in the UI) to disk whenever some image was loads. Plugins in JS or other non-native code are more limited, but UI toolkits tend to have binary plugins.
So if somebody manages to set the some env vars and gets root to run some UI application with those set (e.g. using sudo), then that attacker hit the jackpot. In fact some toolkits will not even bring up any UI when run as root to avoid this.
Running any networked UI application as root is the biggest risk. Those process untrusted data by definition with who knows what set of plugins loaded.
Ideally you run the UI as a normal user and then use sudo to run individual commands as root.
Plugins are a code execution vulnerability by design;-) Especially with binary plugins you can call/access/inspect everything the program itself can. All UI toolkits make heavy use of plugins, so you can not avoid those with almost all UI applications.
There are non-UI applications with similar problems though.
Running anything with network access as root is an extra risk that effects UI and non-UI applications in the same way.
Yes and I do and while it is great for infrastructure, magnitudes better than anything Microsoft ever offered as a reasonable desktop it’s a fucking a joke.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre user here. On paper, GNU Guix System looks exactly what I want from an operating system. The problem I have with it is the software repository full of severely outdated packages. Heck, last time I checked GNOME was three major versions behind. This is a deal breaker for me. It’s a downside that I don’t see coming up often in discussions.
This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to “critical mass” as we’ve got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I’d probably enjoy Guix more.
I’ve found that the unstable branch of nixos has almost all the packages that I want / need at the bleeding edge. For more obscure packages I build from source.
Interested to hear what packages you were chasing that are outdated / not present.
It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’d argue there’s more than one critical mass, and NixOS is already there for the purposes of tinkerers and some early adopters. General Linux people are next, and it’s probably not quite there, which is I think what you’re getting at.
Since it’s the frontrunner as you point out, I have high hopes it will make it.
Keeping a community going is a beast all on it’s own, which is probably what’s missing. Lemmy was pretty dead before Reddit refugees arrived too, or so I hear.
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