Every slicer I’m aware of runs on Linux. I’ve got PrusaSlicer and slic3r installed right now. Cura is on Flathub. Hell, Simplify3D does or did offer a Linux version, though it was one of those janky .run installers where they translate the Windows install process as literally as possible to Linux.

As for modeling software, depends on what kind of modeling. I tend to use FreeCAD, but it’s mostly suitable for engineering and not art.

Ages ago when I still bothered with Octoprint, Cura Engine could be installed as a module, and you could slice an STL on a Raspberry Pi through Octoprint. I quickly gave up on that as a stupid gimmick because you pretty much always need to do adjustments in the plater, but once upon a time Cura could do it.

It has been my experience that you can just forget about disk space usage when sysadmin-ing an old person.

The olds that I’ve set up with computers basically don’t move in. They go to a couple websites. They don’t create files, they don’t install a lot of software, they aren’t playing all 500GB of Red Dead Redemption 2. Like, I’ve gotten ready to move files across, prepared full on network connections or brought large external SSDs to transfer files from one computer to another or to copy them off of Windows to copy them back on with Linux…half a gig of pictures, maybe.

We’re talking about folks who might not install any software on the computer at all because they live in a browser.

I have Mint installed on my Aunt’s laptop, which she basically never uses. Fun thing I learned: APT can get constipated if it doesn’t run in a few months. It got itself somewhere you couldn’t GUI out of so I had to use the terminal. It needed something like an apt clean or an apt --fix-broken or something, the error message it gave me told me what command to run, but that needed to happen.

I think you’re alright, Mint’s whole thing is being defuckulated Ubuntu.

I have told this story several times.

In late 2013 or so, I bought a Raspberry Pi 1B as part of my amateur radio hobby. I did all my actual work on a Windows laptop, the Pi was pretty much just a toy, and I learned a little about Linux with it.

Mid-2014, the display in my aging laptop died. I was going back to school that fall, I needed a laptop. So I ordered a high end Inspiron from Dell. And Dell sold me a lemon. That laptop would just…shut off and never turn back on again. And then I’d call Dell’s tech support. They’d send a tech out within a week or two. He’d throw a part in it, and then it would last somewhere between days and seconds. After waiting over a week to get a tech to come out and fix it, it didn’t finish booting before it died again. I finally got them to replace the laptop outright, with a system that lacked many of the features I had explicitly ordered.

I am no longer a Dell customer.

That whole time, I needed a computer, and the only thing I had was that Raspberry Pi in addition to my Galaxy S4. It was real fun typing up homework in LibreOffice on a single core 700Mhz ARMv6 and 512MB of RAM.

I finally got a running Dell, after an entire semester, loaded with Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 was a total pube fire. Linux felt more familiar at that point, so I tried a few different systems, discovered Linux Mint, and 11 years later I don’t have any computers that run Windows.

many don’t deliver enough power for a Pi 4.

Well, I’ll put it to you this way: If I hire a graphic artist to design a logo for my company, and they turn in a .png they drew in Photoshop, GIMP or Krita, they’re fired. Because I’m going to have my logo on my website, printed on business cards, on key fobs, on the side of work trucks, and painted on the side of buildings. I need a four color variant, a black and white variant and an outline variant, and they all need to work when printed at any scale. Raster art can’t do that. “Hey, can you plasma cut my company logo out of stainless?” “Send over the file.” “…what the fuck is this?”

Hell just having it in .svg format rather than .ai format is gonna be a problem, because Adobe Illustrator is a proprietary industry standard. But I mean, the rest of society is dying, why shouldn’t graphic arts also have the disease?

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.

It is my understanding that Kriita is a raster art program, while Illustrator is a vector art program. Inkscape is a vector art program.

Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can’t when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.

It’s not an extra life, it’s another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.

I also have a Synology NAS. It’s okay. I got a mid-range two-bay one. I could be happier with it. Also, I heard that they’re going toward requiring their brand hard drives, so I’m not buying another one.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

I am gonna try this.

Cinnamon is the second of five attempts to defuckulate Gnome that I’m aware of, and my personal favorite.

A big barrier to Linux adoption is lack of software, and immutable distros locking you out of the traditional package managers like APT or DNF or Pacman and limiting you to what is provided on Flatpak, I think might trip some folks.

I learned how to Linux on a Raspberry Pi. That is, in fact, what they’re for. I’ve got one (a Pi 2) that sits on my LAN with a hard drive attached as one part of my backup solution.

Possibly for this reason, Mint is a great choice for “keep my PC going so I can get to the google and the email and the facebook without having to buy another $1000 machine.” Mint is my go-to to keep a Pre-TPM computer on the road.

If you’ve got actual work to do, don’t.

I’ve got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it’s pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn’t have everything I need to do actual work.