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.
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…
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 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.
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?
Others have given you some good advice but I’ll still give you my opinion because more data points is good.
First of all, as others said, it’s better perhaps if you switch your home computer first or try it out on a VM or dual-boot first as you learn how to use it rather than erasing Windows altogether at first. Regardless of your choice I’d recommend giving it a try still.
Affordability is not a concern at all, most Linux Distros are free and they’ll work perfectly fine, usually when you pay for distros you’re either paying for better tech support or to support the distro itself, and a lot of the software that’s on the repos is also free.
Your biggest concern probably would be re-learning the OS. Now, obviously Linux and windows work very differently, for example installing software on Linux is mainly done via an app-store or the terminal. As for graphics, shortcuts, etc, there’s two approaches here, which one is better depends on your preferences. You can either stick to something similiar to windows, so any distro that has Cinnamon, KDE plasma, or Xfce (you will have to move a few stuff and configure it a bit at the beginning) will do well, I’d recommend Linux Mint; or you can do something more different that will force you to learn something new and will tell you visually “Look, I’m not windows, I’m built different!” so something like GNOME (or customize the other DEs to something you like), personally I’m not a fan of GNOME but it works well for your use-case, as any DE will do, in this case I recommend Pop!_OS.
Both of my recommendetions use apt and are debian (through Ubuntu as the middledistro) derivatives btw. This is important because when you encounter a problem or a certain software not being in the repo it is good to look for sources closely related to your distro.
Linux can do everything you mentioned and more, however compatibility with M$ Word documents/etc can be a bit iffy. Personally I always used LibreOffice and aside from some minor annoyances never had issues with it and using .docx but I also don’t work at a professional environment that requires it to work perfectly. However you’re in luck as you can still use M$ office & other stuff from your browser if needed, tho I assume it will have less resources and will require an internet connection (this can be mitigated by working offline with LibreOffice, OpenOffice or any Office suite you like then copy-pasting it to M$ word or whatever), tho I wouldn’t know since I don’t use either and never planning on doing so. There’s also google docs.
Video types should work just fine especially common ones, VLC is a powerful tool. If you’re installing Mint make sure to install the media codecs at install.
Also I recommend learning the terminal, it may seem scary at first but it is easy, fast and will help you troubleshoot. Also accept that you will encounter problem, like in every system, and you’re expected to solve them yourself, this means you can spend a lot of time looking up stuff, learning to look at logs, etc. This will of course take time but it would take as much if not more time on windows too sometimes, on the bright side Linux tends to be a little better at telling you the problem if you know what to look for and also you almost never have to deal with an issue until the company fixes it, you can literally go and fix the code yourself if needs be. Anyways, on this end I recommend using a stable distribution (like the ones I mentioned), stick to the official repos as much as possible, and at install make a separate partition for your home folder, that way worst case scenario you can always just reinstall the OS (takes 15 mins) without losing your files*. Also, this goes for everything and I can’t stress it enough: MAKE FREQUENT BACKUPS, and better yet do them in multiple places: Proton Drive, external hard disk/USB, an other drive on your PC, whatever just have at least one, preferably 2+, place that isn’t your computer or its main drive be your backup space. This goes for Windows too and even though I assume you know it I will still say it because it’s extremely important and always overlooked.
*Unless you erase the partition by mistake or something.
P.S. also given the nature of your job, you might want to encrypt the hard disk (write the password somewhere and make sure to use a password specifically for it and one you can remember, password managers/generators don’t help here) and learn to use the gpg command when you need to encrypt and sign documents.
A lot of people lately have whined that Linux people are zealoted evangelists. You sure wouldn’t know that in this thread… Most popular jist of responses is “make sure its the right tool for the job first”
To anyone wondering why, it is because it is Arch linux with pre-configured drivers and also it is one of the few distros that are on the bleeding edge of updates and features. Bleeding edge because one update might cut you and break everything for no reason. That being said, I've used Arch for almost a decade for my gaming PC and never had huge issues that reverting to the previous kernel at reboot did not fix.
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