flatbield

For what it is worth, my Bluetooth hearing aids just work on Ubuntu. Have not tried BLE.

Various uses of “find” in particular. “xargs” sometimes too. The capabilities of “bash” in general including scripting and the whole redirection, piping, and multiprocessing capabilities in particular.

No. People do what they do.

What I find more laughable is people complaining profusely about windows but doing nothing about it.

Using something different is hard too. Most people are somewhere between cows and idiots. I have been using Python since the late 90s even on Windows and at work too. I got some strange reactions and push back over the years. You just have to not care. We see now how that turned out. Now everyone agrees Python is useful.

However when many apps have a permission it becomes meaningless.

The thing about most default configs of any OS is that user storage is largely accessable to all apps. True of Linux, Android. Windows, …

Graphene has options to restrict that but you have to set it up that way. Android also has App sandboxing for app data.

Thinking through the threat model of course is always good as is hardening. All security is porous. Linux is fine generally. If one is exposing services on the public net it is not clear that any OS or software is sufficiently secure, that takes constant effort in terms of monitoring and management.

If you have never used a password on windows or some other authentication mechanism then your Windows is not very secure.

Most of the differences you quote are pretty much the same both systems.

I guess the one exception is the UAC prompt which on Linux is a bit more secure in that it requires a password. Some random person or app cannot just click through it.

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Ubuntu though I am less liking the snap dependence. I would avoid atomic distros for now. They are just the latest fad. Not saying bad though.

Transitioned my moms computer to Windows 11, 11 months go. Pretty easy. Her computer was originally for Windows 7 and is still fully supported. Her computer will always be Windows as I’m not local and other people have to be able to support her too. It is also what she knows. I love Linux but it is not for everyone.

Yes. No different. Some ways easier.

Just FYI my wife and her dad have used Linux for decades now. Both nontechnical users. I switched them in mid 00s.

Just keep in mind you will need to do the support when things break or on major upgrades. Otherwise she should have few issues.

Is there a reason to not just use du? Or use either and just look at certain trees? Or just get a bigger drive so it does not matter?

Distros. Pick something in the top 10 of https://distrowatch.com/ .

I use Debian or one of the derivatives of Debian.

I usually buy System76 laptops. Might look at a Framework one next go around. I like supporting the linux supply chain when I can. If money is the only concern, sure some repurposed thing is likely cheaper.

This is the answer. GrapheneOS still needs the binary blob updates from Google or probably more correctly Googles suppliers.

This is why I do not use a rolling release distro.

Actually the safest thing is probably to choose a main system and run the other in a VM like with VirtualBox. For you, you could just install VirtualBox on Windows then Linux inside of a VirtualBox VM. Windows does have a builtin Virtualization solution too you may be able to use, but I have personally never done that. Keep in mind too that VMs are not as performant as bare metal. For video probably NO, for images fine, for audio maybe but you’ll have to see if you get the real-time timing you need in a VM. Good way to play in any case. 2nd best if you have a workstation, not a laptop, you could put in a hot mount SATA drive enclosure, and just swap in the drive you want and get full bear metal performance. Dual boot takes some tech skill. Be sure to back everything up if you do that. Should do that anyway before fiddling. Also if you use bitlocker and secure boot make sure you have all your recovery keys and know how to work with your bios settings too.

Maybe I am missing something, not sure why you care about NTFS. If this is a separate computer you don’t really care about that, just the sharing protocol (SMB for example). If it is on the main box, then you’d probably convert this to Ext4 or something similar. No reason to stick with NTFS with Linux. There are a lot of great FS options on linux plus BTRFS, LVM, or RAID to if you want redundancy.

Regarding apps. The alternativeto site is great. Linux has a bunch of audio and photo software. If your a pro, you may not find any of it sufficient. Especially a lot of people cannot do without Photoshop. The common quoted photo programs are GIMP and Darktable. There are many other photo and image programs. Common audio program is Audacity. Again, there are many others. Looks like some handle vst but I have no personal experience.

That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.

The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?

If you want 2D drafting like solution, look at Librecad. It seems quite good. It is 2D only.

Freecad is 3D solid modeling but there is a 2D component.

FreeCAD is the most common solid FOSS modeler. I do not think any solid modeling system is that simple. They tend to need training and continuous use. That was my experience with SolidWorks and NX anyway.