The logical replacement for Ubuntu is probably Debian. I have quite a lot of Ubuntu servers at work. I am quite seriously considering going upstream. I do like the LTS to LTS promise and that fits well for my customers who like to see enterprisey features without going RedHat or Oracle. You may not have had to deal with “enterprise grade” stuff which loosely translates to bloody expensive and often horrible.
I’m an Arch fan too - actually I’m a Linux fan. I used to do Gentoo (10+ years) but I got tired of my lap overheating. Before that Slackware, Mandrake (Mandriva), RH, Yggdrassil oh and a fair bit of SuSE, not to mention everything Novell did since NetWare 3.1. Whoops, sorry, mind wandering 8)
Wayland and Pipewire will probably do everything eventually but for now, you have functionality gaps. Pipewire is quite amazing and being developed at nearly indecent haste. It might be worth diving in to their community. At worst you will find a lot of like minded people to you.
Use whatever you are comfortable with and works for you. At the moment it sounds like Windows might be the path of least resistance. Fine, go with that.
For me, I finally ditched Windows altogether around 15 years ago. Well, I say ditched - my customers and staff … haven’t.
The list of stuff you have problems with might be tricky on Linux simply because the vendors of music gear are unlikely to give a shit. Nvidia should be fine. I have a VMware VM at home which runs Zoneminder on Ubuntu, with a passed through Nvidia GPU. Surely it should be easier on physical hardware. I wrote this: wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare
You mention gaming so you’ll probably not be bothered with CUDA. You’ll need wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA If that doesn’t do it for you, hit the Arch forums …
The forums can be a bit intimidating but if you keep your query concise and show some evidence of effort, someone will probably get you over the line.
Nextcloud is simply software that runs on something. You might use DNS to find the something that your Nextcloud runs on … or not. A domain can cost as little as say £10/year (no details given - loose costing provided!) but you say you don’t want one.
You could do some weird stuff involving something like this: Your clients update a database on the server with their current IP address(es) and the server reciprocates in kind regularly.
For an internets conversation, both sides need to know IP address, protocol, and optionally port; for both ends. For example, a webby conversation might involve:
My end: 192.168.100.20/24, tcp port 2399 -> NAT -> 33.22.4.66, tcp port 2245 Remote web server: 99.22.33.44/37, tcp port 443
Now, provided both sides are warned off about changes to addresses and port numbers on a regular basis, then comms will still work.
Say, your home external IP address changes, then your browser writes that new address to the remote server and comms continue. Provided one end knows all the details of the other end at any point in time and can communicate local changes then we are good.
I’m Arch and so is my wife (actually) and it doesn’t have a version. We just roll … and today my dongled, wireless mouse has stopped moving. The buttons still work and my laptop touchpad works fine.
I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.
For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: cid-doc.github.io for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.
I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.
If you have an old laptop or PC why not give it a go? You could start here: www.linuxmint.com Another option is to install something like Virtual Box on your existing machine and try out running it as a virtual machine or two. 2 CPUs, 4GB of RAM and 20GB of virty disc will work for any Linux distro as a VM to start off with. There’s also VMware Workstation - there’s a free version. Do discover the joy of snapshots/checkpoints which allow you to roll back failed changes!
25 years ago the options were rather more limited. I started off dual booting Windows and Linux but I don’t really recommend that these days, unless you want to run a gaming rig with both. Few people can afford two lots of top end hardware! I left Windows behind completely around 2004 or 5.
My laptop is a cast off from a member of my staff who said it was too slow - a (dmidecode) - Product Name: HP 255 G6 Notebook PC. It now runs Arch (actually).
It previously slogged along with Win 10, Outlook n O365 n that. Now it does Libre Office, Evolution and much more. I use KDE, which isn’t known for a light touch on the resources. I also do light CAD and other stuff.
My office desktop is even older - it was a customer cast off, due to be skipped around six years ago. I did slap a SSD into it and I think I upped the RAM to 8GB. Its a (ssh, dmidecode): Product Name: Lenovo H330 and the BIOS is dated from 2012! I run two 23" screens off it and again, it runs Arch (actually) and KDE for pretty stuff. I run containers on it - at the moment a test Vikunja instance. I have apache, nginx and caddy fronting various experiments backed up with postgres and mariadb.
Both devices are “domain joined” and I auth to Exchange via Kerberos, via Samba winbind. File access (drive letters for the Windows mindset) is currently via autofs. I have a project on at a member of staff’s request to switch from Windows to Linux. I’m going to take my time and get it right. My current thinking is the Fedora KDE spin and this: Closed In Directory
A scan performed by the researchers found that 77 percent of SSH servers exposed to the Internet support at least one of the vulnerable encryption modes, while 57 percent of them list a vulnerable encryption mode as the preferred choice.
That means a client could negotiate one or the other on more than half of all internets exposed openssh daemons.
I haven’t got too whizzed up over this, yet, because I have no ssh daemons exposed without a VPN outer wrapper. However it does look nasty.
Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.
What’s your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we’ll need a broader chat.
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don’t recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)
Ooh, don’t mind if I do. Luckily I happen to have a tame VMware cluster and rather a lot of laptops (“mwaaa, mwaaa, won’t run Windows 11”) to play with.
One of my employees has actually expressed an interest in Linux as a daily driver, which has only taken 23 years. I’m looking for my corp standard distro and I don’t think Gentoo or Arch are going to do the job. I’m leaning towards Fedora at the moment but there’s no rush, I only get one chance to bring the kids into the light, despite being the MD 8)
Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea
UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That’s why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.
If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.
UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say “fiat” (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.
The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open … per se … provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.
I’ve been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.
Anyway, 23 or so years later … I’m looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)
Me too. I just ran time tree across my home directory a few times. Native console (ie C-A-F3) - 54 seconds, Konsole - eight seconds.
Waveterm is still installing (Arch AUR). The fan has a Gentooesque sound to it as a suspiciously complicated thing gets built. Oh God … electon … terminal shaking … golang … fans whining … lap melting … the Old Ones are stirring.
The deps for this thing are many. " I watched Firefox builds on Gentoo glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate". OK, its now arrived and my laptop case is making ping noises as it cools.
It takes 10 seconds or so to start up. Look pretty. Accept license agreement (wtf). Now what? Hmm lets try typing in that box. OK. time tree. Go back to Lemmy to type the last two paras of this comment, get bored and uninstall waveterm.