To me, XMPP is still the instant messaging gold standard. Everything has an app (or seventeen apps) supporting it, and it tends to just work.
My experiences with XMPP are: very good.
Matrix does more. I have used it on and off for fancier online meet-up type stuff. As others have said, it is relatively new, and that has various costs and drawbacks.
I won’t use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice.
Once again, I’m impressed by Stallman’s focus on not accepting a bad faith arguement at face value.
We didn’t always have shitty laws about when we can copy a file.
Some of us remember when creators had to get creative how they monetized their work, instead of bludgeoning fans with the threat of jail time.
Paranoia is good.
That said, I’ve run his build for a year or so without any issues.
Wayland’s security model comes wiþ trade-offs.
I try not to be too quick to blame the security nerds, because I’m afraid they will shut off my access. (I joke. I love you all…and please don’t shut off my access.)
But it is probably the security nerd stuff. (Thank you for keeping me safe, security nerds.)
Gnome is going through growing pains right now.
I think it discovered it needed to use a different X/Y definition to be true to itself, or something.
KDE seems okay.
You’ve got a bunch of answers already, but I haven’t seen explicit mention that SteamDeck is Linux, so beside ProtonDB, you can also check your favorite game on Steam.
My experience has been that a “SteamDeck Verified” or “SteamDeck Playable” badge means the game runs well on my Linux PC as well.
It’s not terribly interesting anymore. I notice two categories of games that don’t trivially run on Linux:
And there’s the standard cutting edge game disclaimer: Linux isn’t magic. I find games with specific high-end requirements that are still difficult to run on Windows or Mac are usually only slightly easier to run on Linux.
Looked around at a few other distros…nope, still love Mint. 10/10, would do it all over again.
I can relate.
I love to research my next obscure Linux configuration - from the comfort of my trusty reliable Linux Mint PC.
Good point!
I have done this with a USB key. It worked fine.
If you have a network share available, it can be a git remote.
cd NETWORKSHARE
mkdir dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles.git
git init --bare
cd $HOME/dotfiles
git remote add origin NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git
Then do git push and git pull operations as usual. The files at NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git will not be readable, but will have the full history of changes.
If your monitor is currently connected via HDMI, and supports any other type of cable, I would try any other type of cable.
I have had similar issues when the Digital Rights Management (DRM) layer of HDMI was having timing issues, causing a blank screen.
In my case, it would sometimes work, if the power up / wake up / boot up cycles of the monitor and CPU happened to align, but on certain of my PC builds the timing tended to not match up during most boots, and I usually got a blank screen.
Edit: Oh, and classic advice for the ages - when I have the monitor hooked up to a graphics card, I switch it (the monitor cable) over (to the motherboard) for one boot and see if that fixes things long enough to pull some log files and get more info.
My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.
Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.
It’s meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.
Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.
This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.
I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.
That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.
There’s so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.
Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.
Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft’s source code.
Once time I’ve had two bad installs in a row, it was due to my install media.
Many install media tools have an image checker (check-sum) step, which is meant to prevent this.
But corrupt downloads and corrupt writes to the USB key can happen.
In my case, I think it turned out that my USB key was slowly dying.
If I recall, I got very unlucky that it behaved during the checksums, but didn’t behave during the installs. (Or maybe I foolishly skipped a checksum step - I have been known to get impatient.)
I got a new USB key and then I was back on track.
Sorry for your headaches. The door prize is you get to tell this story - to the un-envy of peers - in the future.
or load vim to practice vim motions
Because I sometimes forget, here’s your reminder that vim has a built in :vimtutor command which I have found surpringly good for a few minutes of guided practice now and then.
If you need to reimage it, it sounds like you’re looking for “Headless Rasbian”. As others have said, it is based on Debian.
A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible?
Absolutely. And it’s fun.
Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?
Haha. Yeah. I read somewhere that the Pi3 is the most capable budget PC ever produced, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.
But you can always do more with it later. May as well start with trying what you’re interested in now.
So then what? Use different messengers internally and externally?
I do usually end up asking my team to do this.
The external one is usually Slack or Teams.
I figure it’s worth it for the faster turn around of communication with key clients.
Thankfully, both have web interfaces that work fine on Linux.
Fair enough!
First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.
For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.
For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.
Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.
But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.
For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.
For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.
You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.
Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.
I second the recommendation of Linux Mint. Try a Live USB, and see if it feels fast. If it does, it is a great option.
In terms of theme, have you considered that Linux Mint’s theme is sexy as hell? I wouldn’t install it apologetically. I think it sells itself well.
Edit: and the practical stuff is all in the same places as on Windows, anyway. Start menu is in the lower left. Bar is along the bottom. Time and network applet are in the lower right.
The few ways I have noticed it is different seem to be because Mint doesn’t require corporate branding and names a few things in plain language, instead of MS jargon.