When going over to Linux from Windows full time I landed on Gnome. Despite KDE being superficially like Windows, Gnome keyboard shortcuts are closer to what I’m used to, the defaults feel more sane to me, and the DE gets out of my way faster when in the terminal. I really want to like KDE but it hasn’t clicked for me.

One of the early irritants was way back in the KDE v1 days- the injection of the letter ’K’ in the app names - it harkens back to frat house level shenanigans (at least in the college I attended, except they liked the letter ’Q’). It hasn’t felt right with me.

Dash to panel and a couple of other extensions fixes the main gripes I have with Gnome DE. After testing Cosmic recently I am pretty close to that with my current configuration, and will likely try a transition that DE once it stabilizes.

I can technically manage in any DE generally - heck, I ran CDE on Digital OpenVMS back in the day and it did the job then. It a tool. The terminal is still where things happen for me.

Edits: reformatting the wall of text, added nuance.

An incentive for the users to also drop Microsoft products, starting with Visio?

I’m not convinced Zoom doesn’t just sell your contact information to third parties.

Sounds like you are asking for an iPad or a locked down Android pad. The commercial pad offerings to the non-technical public are GUI only, they spend a huge amount of man hours to create the UX. Even if the Linux desktops are getting better every year, you are accepting a limited experience without the terminal.

GNU Stow, backed up to a git repo.

For those who might not see the purpose, it’s for keeping your profiles on different machines in sync, especially if you use the terminal a lot.

We can choose what we want to run at work. I work as with Solution Architecture and Platform Engineering mainly with Azure, PaaS and dotnet solutions. It’s atypical I suppose but surprisingly seamless.

Doing this in Linux is pretty straightforward and my choice of distro is Ubuntu since last year. I have modified Gnome getting it sorta close to Omakub (the precursor to Omarchy).

The stack, including Dotnet, C#, PowerShell, Bicep, Terraform and Azure CLI works well. I’m midway in my setup of Neovim and have it working with PowerShell and Bicep as well as an assortment of other LSP’s. Additional tools such as JetBrains Rider, Draw.io and Obsidian with Excalidraw are native and so is LibreOffice. For the few workloads I can’t run natively (basically Visual Studio and Office) I have a VM.

The major issue I have found in a lot of workplaces with Windows since forever, disregarding the increasing mess in Windows 11, has been group policy lockdowns. IT tend to look at everyone including devs as office workers (assuming Office is the most advanced tools needed), meaning no admin access and blocked apps.

The whole site is kinda suspect.

Yes, although MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL are the more robust options.

For personal use. As someone who has all my non-trivial creations, including dot-files and scripts I replicate between machines, in repos since CVS has a thing it’s a habit. Version control. This stuff is mostly private but not secret, why should I have it public?

Edit after spell check.

For source code or any project - a folder Projects (on my personal setups) or Documents/Projects/PersonalRepo (more customer specific folders under the Projects sub-folder)

• Anything under ~/Projects that isn’t just a throwaway will be a git repo.
• Anything under ~/Documents/Project/*Repo will be a git repo.

Without knowing what ypu plan is in detail, here’s one example of a plan for a NAS…

• Flash your SAS card or get an LSI card you can flash to IT mode.
• Install TrueNAS Scale and set up your ZFS volume with your existing SAS drives
• If any drive fails, exchange it for a SATA with at least the same size and re-silver.

You wouldn’t need to exchange all of them at the same time as long as the one you are swapping in can hold all the blocks the old one did.

This is the way we did things back in the day in manufacturing. Zebra printers connected to serial connections or via dumb terminals via serial ports being sent ZPL from OpenVMS based applications.

It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.

Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).

From a position of handling corporate data on a daily basis, I am pretty confident that data integrity is top of mind.

How do you ensure that is doesn’t happen? If this is corporate data that can be key.

It could very well be that the package got updated. I did the change once and let it be.

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

Serious games hardware testing channels like Gamers Nexus is a great progression. It brings Linux more into the mainstream while also putting a spotlight on driver deficiencies as well as weaknesses in the OS. How far we have come since the PopOS DE being removed by LTT.

I have X-Plane 12 on Linux and am re-building an approximation of my MSFS setup. The main issues are

• Head-tracking is proving challenging.
• Streamdeck integration is a work in progress
• Navigraph integration is a non-starter. AIRAC updates are completely manual where there are apps on Windows.
• Many 3rd party addons for Garmin navigation are only available on Windows as they rely on the official Garmin trainer software.

The list goes on, but at least X-Plane is a first class citizen on Linux. My controllers work out of the box with only minor deficiencies (drivers for announciator lights are missing).

The work is proceeding, but as the license for X-Plane is valid in Windows as well it’s too easy to just have everything work there.

Signal on flatpak works well, and I agree. The only thing I had to do was edit it with flatseal to let it access my home directory - sending files and pictures didn’t work properly until I did that.

Flatpak can be confusing when you try to access the file system without the rights until you realize it’s the sandbox config.