If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Servers are the one thing I’ve generally heard people agree that snaps are good for, so given its history it’s a bit of a strange thing to hear of Ubuntu being a better server distro than desktop distro nowadays.

I’m a centrist but I lean slightly right, and I’ve used Linux for 15 years. There are plenty of conservatives who use Linux for the privacy and security advantages it offers. At least one of the Linux YouTubers I watch is quite conservative. That said, Linux dev communities don’t tend to take kindly to conservative members voicing opinions while many allow left-wing opinions free rein, and some distro devs have openly stated they don’t want conservatives using their software. They should either allow political opinions from everyone or nobody, IMO. I’d say preferably just leave politics out of it altogether, FOSS should be open to be used by anyone regardless of politics or any other factors.

GNOME is more different from Windows, which means that users will have to put more effort in to get used to the UI, but it doesn’t have as many complicated settings or customizability for EVERYTHING that Plasma does, so it can be less confusing in that sense. I switched to primarily using Plasma a couple years ago and I’m probably with Plasma to stay, but personally I think GNOME might be better for Linux beginners. Though if you really want a beginner-friendly DE, go for Cinnamon.

Definitely, XP was by far the best version of Windows. (Telling that I switched to Linux in the Vista era).

Temple OS returns!

Temple OS returns!

Vista bricked my laptop after a year without a reliable way to recover. Made the switch over in 2009.

It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

I used it a few times. Essentially having a one-click scan was nice, but I could never get it to properly update the virus definitions. Now I just run clamd, freshclam and clamonacc at startup. Uses a ton of RAM but then I don’t have to worry about actually doing anything beyond that.

Thanks for fixing the issue with Discover not launching! That was my last major issue with Plasma 6. Working great now! 👍

Well, the first place to go would be the system repos unless said repos only offer the flatpak version. Then if only the flatpak is in the repos go to the website.

Still waiting to even be able to open Discover in Neon. Once that issue is fixed, all my issues with it will finally be covered!

I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM buys 3 more Thinkpads on eBay

I used Tumbleweed for about half a year 1-2 years ago. Version/dependency hell primarily between the main distro repos and Packman (the repo most multimedia drivers are installed from) was my main issue with it. You could expect either the main distros or Packman to break something between the two about once a month and prevent updates for a few days while the other side caught up. Got annoying, but those things can happen pretty easily on a rolling release.

I’ve looked at the list. The only model that could give me what I’m looking for (5G, actually familiar to US-based carriers and repair shops) is the Pixel. I understand it’s not all the fault of the /e/OS devs since there’s factors like many bootloaders not being unlockable on US phones or other hardware complications, but I do get the feeling that the North American market does tend to be an afterthought. From what I can see, a majority of the list is either only available in Europe or will only work with very few carriers here, with lack of 5G capability being a big setback for carrier compatibility. That 5G requirement for many carriers really does hurt European based phone tech compatibility over here quite a bit.

The people behind Murena are also the devs of /e/OS, a de-Googled Android OS that they also sell phones they pre-load it on. My one critique of it so far, owning one of the phones, is that I wish they would work on making it compatible with more well-known phone models available outside Europe. They sold this model I’m using, the Murena One (some Chinese OEM they slapped their name on), here in the US through their website, but I had to run around for two days trying to find a carrier whose service would work on it (or who would even try - eventually T-Mobile worked, the European-based carrier, what a surprise…) and I can’t get anyone to do repairs on it because it’s not one of the well-known brands. The case they gave me for it is essentially purely cosmetic, and only a week or so into owning it, I dropped it at a restaurant and it got a huge area of dead pixels at the bottom of the screen that nobody will fix because they can’t get a new screen for it. If I could install /e/OS myself on more than just the Google Pixel (paying Google to not have to use Android, fun…) that would be great and solve my problems.

Good to see a lot of stuff getting done, but I REALLY wish they would work on fixing their update methods on Neon. Discover still won’t open, and I can’t use pkcon because of a dependency issue with kio-extras5 that I don’t know how to fix (rather than install anything, pkcon just exits with a fatal error if it notices a problem with any package it would update… Leaving a backlog of other packages that could have been updated otherwise 😑). I can only use apt full-upgrade at this point. If someone at least knows how to fix the kio-extras5 issue, that would be great.

<Or are we just presuming we’re all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?>

Yes, I find that does tend to be the attitude among most Linux articles/videos/etc I see on the subject. There’s some truth to it, in that from what I understand Linux is immune to much of it, but it’s not entirely true. Malware for Linux does exist, so IMO people should not be as complacent about malware as many seem to be, but the community based open-source nature of most Linux software helps mitigate it SOMEWHAT (NOT entirely, because it’s dependent on trusting the community to both want to defend against it and have the skill to do so). Unlike Windows malware defense (to a degree, Windows patches have gotten leagues better than in the past), the primary way Linux stops malware is removing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. It’s another reason you won’t see nearly as much Linux malware showing up as on Windows: it can’t spread if there’s no exploit to spread through. I do still run Clam and a firewall primarily for my own peace of mind because on my system aside from Clamd using a crap-ton of RAM they don’t really slow it down to a visible degree. Long story short, Linux malware is indeed much rarer than Windows malware, but it does exist and I’m not keen on Linux media people giving the impression that security isn’t something to watch for with Linux for the average user.