Are... are we the baddies one percent?
Are... are we the baddies one percent?
I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.
TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!
The uutils project is aiming for full compatibility though, so eventually you will be able to just swap them out.
I had a colleague who ran NixOS on his work laptop and loved it. He even held a presentation to the rest of the engineering dept about it. Then IT contacted him and said company policy only allowed running Ubuntu and he had to reinstall.
He resigned shortly after.
Aside from performance, I also noticed that older PC games work better on Linux than Windows nowadays. I really enjoy playing games from the late 90's to early 2000's, and they tend to run great on Linux with proton. Just the last year I've played all of Baldurs Gate 1, Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 on my scrappy Lenovo laptop and it's been great.
Back in the early days of Ubuntu, I was blown away by the amount of interesting free stuff on Synaptic, so I started installing everything that caught my eye. A few hours later and my Ubuntu install was completely borked. I think the install scripts back then we're pretty unregulated, so there was probably a ton of conflicting dependencies causing trouble.
I eventually reinstalled the os. Then I did the same thing again. Twice. Then I learned.
Just to clarify a few points in #1: CISC has gone largely (entirely?) extinct, so it doesn't play into this. Arm processors are more efficient than x86, but Risc-v is even more efficient than Arm, giving them an edge in cheap, low power computing. However, some companies have started experimenting with Risc-v for HPC applications, so it's turning out more versatile than expected. Just this week there was also news of a bunch of companies banding together to develop Risc-v chips for automobile and Telecom, so don't be surprised if we get Risc-v smartphones and tablets in the near future.
Your setup is close to my 2015 very-much-non-gaming laptop, so... I'd recommend retro gaming and/or modern 2D games. A few suggestions would be: Baldur's Gate 1-2, Icewind Dale 1, Xenonauts, Battle Brothers, Wildermyth, Shadowrun Returns (and sequels), Into the Breach, Fallout 1-2. If you're into programming games, that hardware should run everything by Zachtronics as well as Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans.
KDE is the answer to all of OPs problems.
Kate, Terminator, k4dirstat and the amazing clipboard history app in KDE.
Don't use mono, use dotnet core instead.
Libreoffice is essentially full fat Office at this point. If you need any , more than what it offers, you're more likely than not a computer savvy person already. Photoshop is hard to fully replace though. I ran it in wine for a long time, still haven't found a good alternative.
Wait, encryption counts as bullshit now? ;)
Out of curiosity, do you ever rescue laptops from your work and use or resell them?
I use an ESP32-C3 with Risc-v as my daily driver (for reading air quality sensor data off of a custom circuit) but I don't think that's what OP is getting at.
There's currently only two Risc-v laptops that I've heard of: The Alibaba Roma and the Balthazar Personal Computing Device. Most development is currently happening in SBCs and microcontrollers.
I think I've used it once in 15 years or so. It's typically easier to go with bash or Python.
Plasma is amazing. I'm never going back to Gnome and am ready to become a contributor just because I like the DE so much.
As someone who does all my Linux gaming in Kubuntu, why should OP avoid KDE?
RISC is going to change everything.
I've (almost) always had good experiences with Lenovo laptops, especially T-series or X1 Carbon.
I think a lot of people dislike Ubuntu because of Gnome and Snaps, which is weird to me. You can fairly easily change desktop environment and most Snaps have apt or Flatpak alternatives.
Not OP, but I've been running Kubuntu since 2017 since it's desktop environment looks and works very similar to Windows 7 (desktop with icons, taskbar, launcher, search, options, etc) which is what I was used to after running Windows for two decades before. It's also stable and sees a lot of mainstream apps being ported to it.
What about Intraastral Peace Corps?
I imagine OP had a neckbeard, belt and suspenders and was carrying a copy of Gödel-Escher-Bach.
Just don't expect a smooth user experience yet, its' software is still very much WIP. Google hasn't even finished RISC-V support in Android yet.
Well, there's always the devil you know... (Ubuntu)
I use joe regularly for in-terminal editing. It's easy, lightweight and very helpful, unlike vi...
I just got my Starfive Visionfive2 this week, and yeah... not as easy to use a Raspberry Pi just yet.
Yes, I found a guide for getting Photoshop CS6 running in wine (PlayOnLinux wrapper). A recent update to something broke it for me, but it might still work for others.
Same here, but lately I've also been pushed towards Snap and Flatpak. I miss the old visual Synaptic tool though...
Bad bot
What brand is it? I'm waiting for my crowdfunded mini PC which will definitely be running Linux, so I'm curious as to other people's experiences.
JSP used to be the shit back in the day. Imagine server-side rendered html through Java. Nowadays it's properly regarded as shit, fortunately.
Will the future be better tomorrow?
Snaps. Everyone seems to hate them for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons. But for me, they just work. And if Canonical gets out of line, there's already been proof of concepts of third-party snap repositories, so that's a moot point.
Flatpaks seem like a solution in search of a problem to me. Not everything is a gui app, so not sure why the devs aren't supporting cli apps well. But the biggest problem is that most software I use simply isn't available as flatpaks.
I don't use Endeavor or Arch (btw), but KDE Plasma is amazing. I'd probably be happy with any distro as long as it supported plasma.