Bob Smith

Something like 4 out of 10 important for me, but 10 out of 10 if I share a computer. I keep xfce4 on my computers because I like some of the utilities that come with it by default and I’m not the only person in my home who logs in. The default setup is close to what my people expect and it can be modified easily enough.

That being typed, I use a window manager after spending years adding custom shortcuts to an increasingly modified xfce setup to match my day-to-day use patterns. I got tired of dealing with stacking windows and wanted to try a setup that tiles the windows instead. It made sense at that time to try out a window manager that came closer to what I was looking for. I still use xfce4 if I want to run an x-11 type of environment for some reason, but I’m using sway for my personal day-to-day environment. I’m willing to use KDE or GNOME if that’s what is installed by default, but I’m working against muscle memory when I do so.

For me, Trebuchet goes straight to my brain. There are plenty of fonts that look nicer to me, but that’s the one that I settled on after trying out dozens. I read it faster, I don’t lose my place, it works equally well for me at several font sizes and on both traditional ebook readers and tablet screens.

Syncthing is an option on the desktop side and it works with Syncthing-Fork on Android. It takes a bit of setting up, but I’ve been using a setup like this for years now.

I used one of these (might even be the exact same model) as a little music player attached to an old soundbar. I could connect via ssh and play music through the speakers. The main challenge was finding a distribution that worked well with the internal sound card, since I wanted to use the aux output for sound. I don’t think that I ever tried connecting a monitor to it, but it worked well for what I used it for, right up until I needed the sound bar for something else.

Snap turned several of my oldest Ubuntu boxes into unuseable e-waste before I jumped to a different distribution. This is the sole reason that I left Ubuntu behind back in the day and switched to something else on ALL of my computers. I’m not going through that again.

If notetaking is going to be your primary use, you’ll definitely want to focus on the keyboard experience. Touch-typing on a screen isn’t a fun way to take class notes and a lot of cheap bluetooth keyboards end up being laggy or otherwise unsatisfactory.

I’ve heard good things about Surface tablets and their attachable keyboards. I’ve personally had good luck with two-in-one laptops, where the keyboards are built-in.

When/if you try for a pure tablet experience, be prepared for rough edges. Outside of KDE, Gnome and maybe Budgie, most desktop environments/WMs aren’t designed to work on tablets without keyboards. Getting an on-screen keyboard to act how you want it to act isn’t something that has been solved universally. Another fun wrinkle is that there’s no guarantee that the tablet’s accelerometer will be detected, so it may be challenging to rotate the screen orientation. If you like messing around with settings and downloading half-finished projects from github, then you’ll love playing around with Linux tablets.

This seems like a solid take. Never fuck with your bread and butter.

Stay away from Chromebooks. Even if you get a Chromebook that is reported to play well with Linux, there can be issues. I have/had two different Linux Chromebooks. They both had unique pitfalls.

I had an arm-based Chromebook that was actually the development target of a custom distro. At its best, it still required a fairly specific wifi dongle to work without kernel hacks. Even then, the processor was slooow and storage was a bit of a problem if I was using it for anything other than text editing.

I’m running an intel-based Chromebook these days with Arch. The biggest bottleneck is the built-in nonupgradeable storage (16gb). Most of my home folder is symlinked to an SD card that I keep in the slot at all times. It works well and has great battery life, but there are easier ways to play with linux on a laptop.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, both of which are versioned release distributions. The idea behind versioned releases is that the kernel and a lot of the software are all chosen and tested to work well together. It gives the user a system that won’t change much for several years. Rather than getting the latest and greatest, you get a known, relatively static set that works smoothly and gets security/stability updates rather than big upgrades. Typically, distributions like Mint only get minor security updates to the chosen kernel during their lifetime. You’ll see additional patches to kernel 6.8, but nothing beyond that.

To get a newer kernel, the safets option is to wait until Mint 23 gets released and do a full upgrade to the new version of Mint. Along with the kernel, other pieces of the operating system will get a bump to much newer versions. Mint gives you the option to try newer kernels, but this is less stable and could break your system.

There are other types of Linux distributions that ship new versions of the kernel much more regularly. Rolling releases (to one extent or another) update the kernel and other software shortly after the new code is available and tested.

If the lessons that I’ve learned about lightbulb replacement are applicable, then the nationality of the developers on the bus will impact the answer to your question.

I wish you luck with your campaign!

The sanctions apply to the BSDs too. The only difference with sanctions that I could imagine would be if one of the BSDs had (through happenstance or other factors) a lower starting proportion of Russian developers relative to Linux. If that were the case, then the impact of sanctions on that BSD would be proportionally smaller.

I’m lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn’t think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.

For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I’d care to enumerate. There’s a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!