This is where I’m at too. If I go crazy and start installing stuff natively to experiment I end up with extra stuff auto configured that’s no longer needed and random problems I’m too lazy to figure out how to solve. Flatpak doesn’t do that and I don’t have to worry about that. I can install random stuff to play with and uninstall it cleanly. Some packages need more system access than flatpak gives natively and with those I’ll make the decision of if I want to set it up and tear it down manually or not.

Storage is cheap, my time not so much.

If you are administrating systems it’s extremely useful to know how to work with stuff by command line, both for remote administration via SSH or Ps-session and for rapid troubleshooting/settings changes and of course for emergency recovery when everything is super broken.

Honestly I personally use a mix of both GUI, CLI and hosted admin portals (the 11 ton gorilla in the room everyone arguing over GUI vs CLI forgets about) and will shift between tools depending on what is best for the given job.

Of course if you’re just an owner-operator, see Joe Average in Anytown America with his household laptop, the GUI tools are the only thing you’ll want to use and even that might get overwhelming or scary, but Joe Average is more often than not these days going to not even own a computer and instead just use their phone. That’s the other thing many folks in these threads forget, is the home computer is a market on life support. The average “not a computer person” does not own a computer at all, they use their smartphone for literally everything

Winget install [programname]

winget search [programname]

winget upgrade --all --silent

Oh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!

Btop will also show disc and network utilization while running much lighter than glances. Personally I keep both btop and htop installed on all of my machines because I feel like htop is better for quickly killing a processes when needed

Honestly, if it’s important enough to RAID, it’s important enough to do right and run full fat ZFS.

You could also go the mdadm route with individual disks but ZFS pools are so battle-tested that whatever unholy edgecase you manage to create will almost certainly be something someone has encountered before, and it’s probably well documented somewhere how to recover from

That’s one of the features Google should have stolen from Cyanogen/LineageOS long ago which had permissions differentiated between precise location and approximate

There’s a double-i in “settings” in the documentation screenshot

I certainly agree, but you can’t replace your entire software, server and groupware stack in a day. Start by transitioning the easiest stuff off of Microsoft, tie it into your existing stack then slowly transition away. Shutting off the last domain controller is a lot easier when you only have a handful of Windows workstations that rely on it than when you have 5000 of them

You seem to be missing the point. All software has a point where it reaches end of support. The problem is Windows 11 has significantly increased the system requirements so that only computers produced in the last 7 years or so are “compatible” and lots of perfectly workable but slightly older machines are now destined for the ewaste burn pit purely because of that decision

And you can just install Edge if you really want to. It’s on flathub

Ehhh it’s not as bad as it used to be. Depending on the distro you might have some finagling to install it to begin with but otherwise their drivers tend to be fine.

It is however much nicer when you can just boot up a bog standard kernel and not have to worry about installing third party drivers, but it’s not the end of the world if you do have to toss some third party drivers in there

I have a bad professional habit of treating windows machines like Linux, abusing PS Sessions like its SSH, downloading everything via winget, and generally trying to do as much of my admin work without popping open RDP as I can. Sometimes that works super well, and sometimes it throws me for a loop. But most importantly, it opens certain doors that remain shut for folks who insist on always RDPing in and using the GUI

Ubuntu supports AD authentication out of the box, so for users whose duties primarily occur in a web browser that rapidly becomes a vary viable option

Yeah there’s a reason I didn’t even call that one out and just called it a bait. It’s in flathub, frequently featured in flathub, and in the same article they spoke with a nonprofit that stated they preload older computers with Linux Mint now, which has a graphical software center that covers both Flathub and the Ubuntu repos

The sad thing is Roku’s UI was pretty dang good before they added a row of ads at the top, a half screen ad on the left and replaced the background with an ad every 2 weeks, waiting a full minute for it to load the latest nonsense the highest bidder paid them to shove in my face. The ads absolutely ruin a good platform.

That’s literally what the representative from the charity said they did in the linked article

Hey if you’re in the states, I ended up with a pallet of PCs from an auction I didn’t expect to win and my wife would be happy to see one more disappear, so if you want to cover shipping I’d be happy to send it off to ya. They’re just HP Elitedesk SFFs with 4th gen i5s, but there’s a bunch of half-height PCIe slots and 3.5" bays and even a DVD drive so plenty of expandability to get yourself into trouble with

My last go-around with Linux gaming was pre-steam deck. I think it ended around 2018ish? So it’s been long enough I should probably give Linux a real try again sometime

However, Linux still lacks some popular applications, such as Microsoft Office and Slack, though alternatives are available.

Lol nice bait. Real talk though, just toss shortcuts to word.office.com, excel.office.com and outlook.office.com on the desktop and nobody will be any wiser

I remember thinking that when I was a kid and saw a clip on PBS Kids of a kid using their home fax machine to fax their dad a picture they drew at work. I was also like 4 so teleportation was still distinctly possible to my brain