kumi

I adored Budgie precisely because it was still on X11 🥲

Anyway, for a relatively simple and clean holistic GNOME-that's-not-GNOME, it's a very polished desktop. Worth checking out for your F&F.

The need to think about and deal with snaps is the reason I don't recommend Ubuntu to noobs in general. It's confusing and unnecessary and adds to the frustration of being forced to make judgement calls about things you don't want to understand just to do your thing (we have enough of that as it is). And if you do decide against snaps, it's a bit of an uphill battle and it's easy to start feeling that the OS, like what they came from, is antagonistic. Canonical decided to isolate and take control of part of the Ubuntu ecosystem with snaps and that has made the distro a bit more niche compared to before.

For better or worse Ubuntu is also known to be on the edge with new developments on the desktop. Switching to new shiny desktop environments between major versions, being very early on Wayland-first, etc. Having to learn new OS UI after an upgrade is not ideal if you are not an enthusiast.

Other than that, Ubuntu can be a fine distro, both for server and desktop. If you either accept the particularities like snaps or know how to work around them, it can be a very good experience and it's well-maintained in general. But it's less of a no-brainer and more situational if it's appropriate or not.

Like Alpine or Gentoo: Great distros but for different reasons not anything I would recommend a non-technical Linux virgin to replace their Windows or macOS with.

Good first distros for beginners:

• Linux Mint Debian Edition
• EndeavourOS
• Debian
• Pop! OS
• Fedora Workstation

Not Good first distros but still getting picked up by people who don't know:

• Manjaro
• Ubuntu
• Omarchy
• Zorin
• Garuda

Everyone: If you've only used one of the latter, try another distro before you believe "Desktop Linux is not ready" or "Linux is not for me".

Specifically on Steam: Which hardware you run on can affect on which distro it runs out of the box on and if you need to fiddle with drivers and firmware or not to get things running smoothly. There is also some difference between installation methods (some people swear by the flatpak version and others swear off it).

Maybe also check the health of your SSD and that your firmware/BIOS are up to date.

In this case they are apparently fine with a personal computer being used

Where? Looks ambiguous. From all we know this is a work computer provided by the employer. It's more likely to be an oversight or deprioritized/neglected.

which makes RDP actually a slightly more secure solution

I do not see how that folllows.

If both the company and employee are indeed fine with the RDP, it should be no problem to get that confimed from IT in writing.

Separate your personal and work computer

nods enthusiastically
Important for security of both the employee and the company. Don't mix business and pleasure. It's the only thing that makes sense!

Put Windows and all work related software on a separate work laptop and use remote desktop from your Linux PC to do your job.

What? No! Keep them separate! This is how people get pwned. Don't backdoor your employers machine from your personal PC or vice versa!

What is the reason you are not considering running chromium or firefox in kiosk mode and just opening the slideshow view in a fullscreen web browser without the chrome?

dnf --cacheonly

I run the overleaf (formerly sharelatex) container stack locally and edit in a browser for the rare occasion. Had to patch up the containers a bit but it still seems like less trouble than setting up a proper latex cli env with all the plugins and stuff.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

zsh envy is dead

If anyone else is seeing high resource use from seeding: There's quite some spam and griefing happening to at least Debian and Arch trackers and DHT.

Blocking malicious peers can cut down that by a lot. PeerBanHelper is like a spam filter for torrent clients.

https://github.com/PBH-BTN/PeerBanHelper/blob/dev/README.EN.md

On 1: Autoseeding ISOs over bittorrent is pretty easy, helps strengthening and decentralize community distribution, and makes sure you already have the latest stable locally when you need it.

While a bit more resource intensive (several 100GB), running a full distribution package mirror is very nice if you can justify it. No more waiting for registry sync and package downloads on installs and upgrades. apt-mirror if you are curious.

Otherwise, apt-cacher-ng will at least get you a seamless shared package cache on the local network. Not as resilient but still very helpful in outage scenarios if you have more than one machine with the same dist. Set one to autoupgrade with unattended-upgrades and the packages should be available for the rest, too.