Without knowing the exact programs, you can only get general answers.
If there is no direct alternative program, you can change your workflow to use other programs. Or you can try to run those important programs in wine. Or i can run those in a terminal server, or via a windows vm. Or more lately many programs come in web versions that works for everyone.
I have used linux exclusivly on my daily driver for about 23ish years.i mostly work with the linux side of things. And the few windows things the company require i use web versions, or a windows vm.
I mean, who would have thought 10 years ago that this would one day be a valid reason to switch away from the OS with the biggest marketshare. Weird times.
I think you should absolutely download a Linux distro or three along with VirtualBox and try it out. Look at a couple different desktops, play with cowsay, have a good time.
Don’t switch to an unfamiliar operating system on a work machine without doing a lot of learning first.
Linux itself works in a very different way to Windows. The file system is fundamentally different, for one. You should learn how the Linux file system works, how it’s structured, how users and permissions work, etc.
You would be amazed the little things I’ve seen people lose their shit over. Give a small example, I saw a guy blow all the way up because Linux doesn’t use the word “shortcut.” You know how in Windows, you can have an icon on your desktop with that little arrow next to it, and it might start a program, or it might open an individual file? In Linux, those concepts are called Launchers and Links respectively. There’s a lot of little details like that. Keyboard shortcuts, what the middle mouse button does, all that kind of stuff is different as well, and that kind of thing even varies between distros.
You’ll have to learn how to administer the system, how to keep up with updates, how to take and restore backups for your files and for the system. How to secure the system.
The bigger thing is going to be the software library. The phrase “word documents” stands out to me. There are several different productivity suites and word processors available for Linux, none of them are perfectly compatible with MS Word. In college I found that LibreOffice was perfectly adequate for projects I was doing myself. MLA formatted essay? No problem at all. Group project where you have to work together on a powerpoint presentation? Functionally impossible. I’ve given plenty of talks using LibreOffice Impress for visual aids, it works fine, but it interoperates with MS PowerPoint about as well as my cat does. If you’re expected to communicate documents to other lawyers, the government etc. in .docx format…Linux may not be the best choice at least yet.
Your Word templates and such would likely have to be converted or redone. You don’t need to install a Linux machine to find that out; you can install LibreOffice on a Windows machine and try it out.
PDF support is a bit better with the exception of forms. I forget exactly why, which organization was being a little pissy diaper bitch about putting closed source components in an open standard, was it Adobe themselves or the USPS of all people (why do I remember they’re involved?), but PDF forms aren’t well supported in PDF readers and writers available for Linux, and Adobe doesn’t publish Acrobat for Linux. Typing up a word processing document and saving it as a PDF, opening a PDF and looking at it? Those work perfectly fine.
Viewing videos and that sort of thing, I’ve never run into a problem with that sort of thing on Linux, VLC is present and accounted for, and codecs aren’t the nightmare they were back in the heyday of Windows Media Player.
Affordable we got. Linux and practically the entire software ecosystem are available for free, and Linux will run very well on computers that Windows doesn’t. I’ve got a Dell here from 2012, it’s got an Intel Core i7 with three digits in the part number, it doesn’t run Win11 and feels like shit running Win10, feels brand new running Linux Mint. You don’t need to buy a brand new top of the line machine to get a decent experience out of a typical Linux distro.
You expressed some concerns about not being a programmer. You don’t need to be a programmer to use Linux, at least not this decade. It probably helped in the 90’s. I will say though, one of the biggest advantages of Linux is how close at hand scripting tools like Bash and Python are. For example, I have a script that converts .docx files to .pdf files without launching any applications, and it appears in the right click menu when I right click a .docx file so it’s convenient to run. It’s like a two line bash script with a 7 line config file that’s mostly stuff like what text and icon to put in the right click menu. This doesn’t require a degree in computer science. On any platform, you might want to look at an autokeyer, which can save you a surprising amount of time.
I will strongly second the “don’t use an unfamiliar OS for critical work tasks” sentiment.
I got a MacBook for work, before I had ever used mavOS before and it was absolutely infuriating and anxiety inducing because I couldn’t get my actual job done.
The OS was in the way. And it was small simple things. I shit you not trying to just use the “delete” key made me almost throw the MacBook out the window.
And if I may expand upon this, I bet you don’t think this is MacOS being objectively terrible. There are lots of Mac users and they seem to get along with it just fine, and in fact they look at you weird for fussing about it.
I’ve often pointed at an LTT video where they had iJustine on as a guest, and Linus and Justine swapped platforms, him on a Mac and her on a Windows PC, and they were given a series of tasks such as “install Slack. Take a screenshot. Save that screenshot as a PDF. Save that PDF to a thumb drive. Attach it to a Slack message” etc. And both of them hit points where they said “Oh, you’re going to struggle with that.” Apparently the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot on a Mac makes no intuitive sense, and at least at the time Windows 10 didn’t ship with software capable of saving a word processing document as a PDF. They both struggled, and they both hit things where they thought someone unfamiliar with the platform would struggle.
Just as you will encounter culture shocks transitioning from Windows to MacOS, you will encounter culture shocks transitioning from Windows to Linux. The time to get used to a new OS isn’t when a client needs some important documents right away.
Do not get me wrong, OP. I would love to see your independent law firm running open source software rather than relying on the megacorporate duopoloy. I think you can do it, but I want to be clear that you will likely need retraining and experience in the new platform.
I do strongly encourage trying a distro or three out in VirtualBox, right there on your Windows machine. Give it a look, play around, follow some tutorials, have some fun. Install VLC and LibreOffice on your Windows machine and see if they’ll do the work you need them to. I also strongly encourage you to come tell us how it goes.
Install steam and test which of your games will run in mint. Some might require proton, but I’m sure you’ll find that you don’t need that many reboots.
In my opinion, the full potential of linux is gained via the command line. The GUI is just an abstraction layer, and various distros have various approaches to this abstraction. Comman line familiarity is far from a necessary step, but it sure is a useful one.
Fuck, me too and I’ve actually got a convertible tablet already that works pretty well on Linux (Lenovo X12, better bang for the buck than a Surface which was my previous favorite).
Per latest updates people should start getting their hands on first units early December. I have pre-ordered mine almost 3 months ago now and can’t wait!
I am using input by a pen a lot, to draw in my PDFs. It seems like Starlite doesn’t support that? I hope I am wrong, this is a major reason for 2-in-1s, isn’t it.
I hope they also look at Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop. It’s massively popular and that team work very hard. I’m sure they could use that support to help them focus on improving Cinnamon, the toolkit, accessibility etc.
Happy for Gnome though, they are a long standing project and used by many distro’s. I have used Gnome in the past and it’s decent, although a little heavy on RAM.
Would be great to see Debian also get this, being one of the oldest Linux distro’s and the basis for Ubuntu, which in turn has spawned many distros.
Oh, I’ve nuked partitions in the past before, and was able to recover using photorec, when doing it, just make sure you don’t save the files to the drive you’re running recovery on
Also, all of us have done things because we didn’t know better. The only dumb thing to do here is to not learn how to fix this. Try and fail, so next time you know how it works and can do better.
Unless it was encrypted, it prob doesn’t matter. The partition table is just the road map that points to the houses (files). A tool like FTK or PhotoRec goes byte by byte to find the files and figure out what they are. You won’t have file names, but the data might still be there.
I got it running now! I did not have that much to recovery, so everything will fit in home. Mostly word files, PDFs, and pictures. Few movies and music.
Filesystems aren’t so simple. Modern advanced filesystems like btrfs, zfs and bcachefs are more than just filesystems.
E.g. they include features like volume management, compression and sometimes encryption. Most features can also be achieved with for example ext4 + lvm + luks, but it’s nice to have all in one system with unified configuration.
tl;dr
Btrfs does more than ext4, which can have a negative performance impact, depending on the use case/metric. Usually the features gained by btrfs outweigh the small difference in performance imo.
Btrfs doesn’t do encryption, so luks is still necessary. LVM isn’t needed since btrfs subvolumes achieve the same in a more flexible way (no fixed size, snapshots).
It’s mostly better, but not in every way. It has a lot of useful features, at a performance cost sometimes. A cost that historically wasn’t a problem with spinning hard drives and relatively slow SATA SSDs but will show up more on really fast NVMes.
The snapshots, it has to keep track of what’s been modified. Depending on the block size, an update of just a couple bytes can end up as a few 4k write because it’s Copy-on-Write and it has to update a journal and it has to update the block list of the file. But at the same time, copying a 50GB file is instantaneous on btrfs because of the same CoW feature. Most people find the snapshots more useful than eeking out every last bit of performance out of your drive.
Even ZFS, often considered to be the gold standard of filesystems, is actually kinda slow. But its purpose isn’t to be the fastest, its purpose is throwing an array of 200 drives at it and trusting it to protect you even against some media degradation and random bit flips in your storage with regular scrubs.
A couple nits to pick: BTRFS doesn’t use/need journaling because of its CoW nature - data on the disk is always correct because it doesn’t write data back over the same block it came from. Only once data is written successfully will the pointer be moved to the newly-written block. Also, instantaneous copies from BTRFS are actually due to reflinking instead of CoW (XFS can also do reflinking despite not being CoW, and ZFS didn’t have this feature until OpenZFS 2.2 which just released).
I agree with the ZFS bit and I’m firmly in the BTRFS/ZFS > Ext4/XFS/etc camp unless you have a specific performance usecase. The ability to scrub checksums of data is so invaluable in my opinion, not to mention all the other killer features. People have been running Ext4 systems for decades pretending that if Ext4 does not see the bitrot, the bitrot does not exist. (then BTRFS picks up a bad checksum and people scold it for being a bad filesystem)
People have been running Ext4 systems for decades pretending that if Ext4 does not see the bitrot, the bitrot does not exist. (then BTRFS picks up a bad checksum and people scold it for being a bad filesystem)
ZFS made me discover that my onboard SATA controller sucks and returns bad data occasionally under heavy load. My computer cannot complete a ZFS scrub without finding errors, every single time.
Ext4, bcache and mdadm never complained about it, ever. There was never any sign that something was wrong at all.
100% worth it if you care about your data. I can definitely feel the hit on my NVMe but it’s also doing so much more.
A file system and a raid setup all in one with facebook's code for de-/compression ... yet another piece of software that tries to do the work for several others.
ext4 will rarely have extreme loads unless all you do is backup and mirroring. For more accurate data read/write and better checks use xfs and external journaling. On M2 it is by far the fastest solution and far more secure than ext.
On magnetic disk there is physical location for each bit of data written, for ssd it is all virtual space handled by internal software simulating a magnetic drive. The variation from disk to disk is much higher than the sensitivity of the fs.
You want accuracy and reliability of data storage, use HDD and Raid!
RAID doesn’t checksum and heal the rotten data. It’s game over before you even have a filesystem on top of it, because said filesystem can’t directly access the underlying disks because of the RAID layer.
Errors will occur, and RAID has no way of handling it. You have a RAID1, disk 1 says it’s a 0, disk 2 says it’s a 1. Who’s right? RAID can’t tell, btrfs and ZFS can. RAID won’t even notice there’s a couple flipped bits, it’ll just pass them along. ZFS will just retry the read on both disks, pick the block that matches the checksum, and write the correct data back on the other disk. That’s why people with lots of data loves ZFS and RAIDZ.
The solution isn’t more reliable hardware, the solution software that can tell you and recover from your failing hardware.
Alpine is very lightweight. I think it was built so that it would run well inside docker containers, which means it should be fairly easy for low-end computers to run it.
Afaik, it doesn’t come with a DE out of the box, so it won’t be very user-friendly
All I have to ask is why though? They already have access to skinned aosp and from there can(and do)quite a bit of tweaking on their own. Fireos has been a worse version of android for some time now and Im unsure what the benefit of making their own in house OS would be.
If it’s a true GNU/Linux OS with compatibility with linux programs, then that would be kind of neat, and if it’s open enough to let advanced users install flatpaks(I suspect it’s going to be immutable so at least flatpaks would be nice) then that could be neat. Currently it’s very easy to sideload on fireos devices and even install the play store in full so it’s possible the end product could be more like the steamdeckOS which is very much a user friendly store front end with a power user true linux experience underneath.
That said, for some reason I suspect that they will be locking things down even more and its going to be one of those many user facing linux devices that’s technically linux but very limited. Like a smart fridge interface or something. If this is the case then dropping android support would be a bad move. You lose easy/lazy portability to your store from developers who already have a product to sell and you lose many apps that already exist, and for power users you lose access to the many apps that can easily be side loaded like tachiyomi(though I imagine amazon would rather you buy from them than buy their subsidized $80 tablets to read pirated manga/comics and library books on libby)
But who knows if they actually do an OK job this could lead to a new wave of GNU compatible touch forward apps for the rest of us. Linux has gotten a lot better at touch forward design over the last 4 or 5 years on its own, but its still fairly rough.
Check for the ssh env vars. For example, I use PS1=“${SSH_CONNECTION:+u@h:}W$” to hide the hostname when not on SSH, you could do something similar with the control codes for color.
First, Fedora is not Red Hat but their own community. (Although heavily sponsored by Red Hat) Second, Red Hat is FOSS.
The ones hostile to FOSS are all the freeloading companies, which used the work of Red Hat to increase their own profit, w/o contributing anything back.
If it is so easy, cheap and so much fun to support a stable Distribution for 10 years with backports for security vulnerabilities and drivers, I am very surprised that we don’t have hundreads of community distributions which do this.
Finally, over the years Red Hat contributed a load of the things we take for granted now.
(Writing this as a happy Debian user. I am just tired of reading this kind of bullshit again and again and again.)
I’m with you on this. I’ve been using openSUSE since it was SuSE Linux, and I still here bs on occasion about how they sold out open-source to MS. I’m not a huge fan of what Novell did back in the day, although it did end up costing MS more money. That said the opensuse community is not whichever corporation owns SLE currently, and they still contribute back to the community.
Thanks! And I totally agree with you: We don’t have to defend or like what the corporations/companies do, most of their moves I don’t like. OTOH Linux would not be anywhere w/o their investment. (Sad look over to the *BSDs, Haiku and ReactOS.)
There is so much crazy good and innovative output from the communities around Fedora and openSUSE (I like what is happening with Aeon right now, very cool and innovative)… so IMHO it should be the default for every FOSS user to project the communities which produce great products free of charge from bullshiters. :-)
This is why I hate Linux fanatics. They think everything that isn’t Foss is malware or something. I’ve been using Fedora for months now and it was my first time using Linux. Is probably the most modern and best working distro right now. Like it or not is amazing, and with 39 it’s even smother. Never had any problems, works perfect with Gnome and nothing has ever broken. Even games play just like in windows with a bit of tweaking in proton. You should maybe try things first and not be so paranoid about Red Hat. It’s a company just like many others. You think Arch or Mint wouldn’t become just like Red Hat if they had the user’s numbers? This world is all about money, so stop complaining and just let people enjoy
I’ve been using Fedora for months now and it was my first time using Linux. Is probably the most modern and best working distro right now.
I’m not gonna suggest to you to switch distros or whatever. But most of the modern feeling you are seeing is just the DE, which you can use whichever one with whatever distro. As far as Fedora’s own stack the centerpiece which is the package manager is actually really slow comparing with anything else.
You think Arch or Mint wouldn’t become just like Red Hat if they had the user’s numbers?
Yeah. They wouldn’t. I think they actually already do have higher number of users than fedora actually. If they don’t, then Debian surely does.
Red Hat is a for profit company, and their first goal will always be that even if that means squeezing you and making the experience worse for you.
Community distros are explicitly about the community and not about profit, and it works quite well.
Red Hat’s business is mostly in servers and service to host for companies. Fedora is a side project at most. That’s why I find it funny that people think Red Hat is going to destroy Linux or something. My point was that companies want to make money, and if a distro becomes really really popular is inevitable that sooner or later some kind of corporation will put it’s hands on it.
I know Fedora is mostly just Gnome, but you can’t deny it’s probably the best implementation of it in any distro. I tried KDE and wasn’t for me. I got used to gnome’s workflow real quick, I have trouble using Windows even. And Arch is definitely not easy to install for a newbie. Idk, I guess all this drama with Fedora is just pointless to me
if a distro becomes really really popular is inevitable that sooner or later some kind of corporation will put it’s hands on it.
Not how it works. And more so in general if you’re interested and curious do some reading on copyleft licenses. It’s truly a marvelous thing and they work quite well at keeping projects open.
I know Fedora is mostly just Gnome, but you can’t deny it’s probably the best implementation of it in any distro.
I absolutely can, what. It’s about the same as all other distros that don’t add much or at all to the upstream version.
And Arch is definitely not easy to install for a newbie.
If you are interested in trying it some time, once you’re in the installer type “archinstall”. It’s a default installation script that makes it easy to install. There isn’t nearly as much upkeep as the memes would suggest.
I tried archinstall. It’s still not easy, specially if you are not very well versed in os installs. As long as Fedora works it will be fine for me.
In any case, whatever you install will be better than Microsoft’s Windows, now thats a predatory company! I’ll never go back to Windows. And maybe in the future I will try my luck with another distro
Fedora IS the most modern distro. First to adopt pipewire, systemd, enables flatpaks by default and btrfs. Probably other things I don’t know. Being first is one of their core goals
Afaik, Fedora is a free software. I don’t deny that, and I’m a free software fan. I don’t have any problems with fedora besides that it is too heavy for me.
It looks you also care about your freedom because you use gnu/linux and lemmy. However, it seems you have a different meaning of malware.
Softwere is a recipe. Any unwanted step is malicious. You can only determine a step as unwanted by seeing its source code.
Besides this, a softwere can have other functions that are not coming from the code but the license. Similarly they can be malfunctions. For example preventing you from modification.
So yes, propriatory software is malware. I use some malwares also, because they have no alternatives yet. But let me call them malwares.
Copyright is the example of capitalism polluting water to be able to sell clean water to people.
You’re not wrong. But you are talking about the extreme who won’t use anything non-FOSS. In general, it is fair to say that all proprietary software is malware.
No one is allowed to change and fix it but the developer, thus you are harmed by being dependent on the will and motivations of the dev. Increasing dependence is always malus
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