I remember building the kernel with the NE2000 drivers and having a network card for just installation and getting the 3com or RTL driver source over to the new install, then compiling those drivers, installing them, and downing the system to put the proper card in. There was a very small subset of sound cards and video cards that worked reliably. The notion that Linux was the OS where hardware just worked out of the box was ludicrous.

The DEs were pretty horrible and the software to use on them was scant. So desktop Linux was a pipe dream. I used Linux entirely as a security/server appliance. I built a couple hundred iptable/ipchains firewalls for businesses out of recycled pentium type desktops until hardware firewalls became a thing, it was fairly lucrative for a while there.

Ha, I still use rods for certain things.

Not as confusing as Debian though.

I mean, it’s bcachefs. It’s far from production ready.

If LO doesn’t work for her, there are other options like OnlyOffice and WPS Office as well.

Wayland support in Mint is experimental, it’s not worth your time if you’re playing games. X11 is on maintenance-only life support these days.

I ran WoW for years on Arch until I stopped playing a few years ago. IDK what the experience is like these days, but it was fine then.

Personally, since I don’t like the runaround to install things on Bazzite, I would use Nobara or just vanilla Fedora with your own drivers. You can use Btrfs Assistant to set up Snapper snapshots and boot entries if you want, but I’ve never seen a Fedora update fail in any critical way. Frankly, I’d be inclined to just go with vanilla Fedora since GloriousEggroll is a busy guy and updates aren’t very up to date on Nobara IME.

Yah, and it has it’s limitations, but it’s far lighter than electron IME.

God bless the rains down in Africa.

Not with that attitude, it isn’t.

I’ve been using Flutter, I like how it’s cross-platform, mostly. I’ve generally built things for Android, but the desktop (Linux and Windows) and web versions usually compile fine with no tweaking. Couldn’t speak to the iOS versions as I can’t be arsed to jump through Apple’s hoops. You can make a nice looking app with it for whichever platform you’re targeting.

It’s very well supported, lots of examples, well documented. Not as much out there as Python for examples and troubleshooting, but not bad.

I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.

I mean, it sucks, but the stupid shit people will do with company laptops…

Nobara is a great option if you don’t want to deal with the weirdness of installing stuff on an immutable distro. Nobara also has a bunch of tweaks for video editing software like OBS and Blender.

Domain authentication and group policy analogs. Honestly, I think it’s the major reason it isn’t used as a workstation OS when it’s inherently more suited for it than Windows in most office/gov environments. But if IT can’t centrally managed it like you can with Windows, it’s not going to gain traction.

Linux in server farms is a different beast to IT. They don’t have to deal with users on that side, just admins.

House next to nazi bar.

I haven’t lasted long enough after the Search piss-off to notice the tomfoolery of that. Well, you probably shouldn’t be creating new folders from there, don’t you understand how the workflow-as-handed-down-by-Jehosaphat is supposed to be used?

Honestly, that defaulting to the Search field in the Save dialog when I’m trying to save something just gets me wild. It beggars the imagination why the developers think that’s a reasonable thing to do and it colors my whole perception of the DE.

Plasma for the last decade. Then probably XFCE, then Cinnamon.

I try Gnome every year or so, but every time I get pissed off with it within a few minutes and wipe it off my machine.

If you don’t want telemetry, you have to use VScodium, and then you don’t get to use marketplace. Github didn’t start as a Microsoft project or it would be far more enshittified than it is now, but even so Microsoft is sure trying to fuck that up with their Copilot bullshit.

WSL is the definitition of EEE, and has prevented a great deal of Linux-ward movement that might have happened without it, even with IT department resistance. It’s a crutch to keep devs from having to go to Linux to get the useful tools, like docker which is a mess on Windows, but just usable enough to get by.

And oh, yes, Teams can get shot with a ball of its own shit and fall into the dumpster fire.