No. I do not care what operating system people use, how they use it, if they dual boot, etc. If someone reaches out to me for help with Linux, I will help out and provide suggestions and guidance. If someone wants to dual boot and mostly use windows, cool. If they want to go back to windows or MacOS after using Linux, cool.

I use what I use, the way I use it, because it works for me. Because I enjoy it. Because I find value in it.

What other people decide to do or not do with their operating system choice has no effect on my life, or my thoughts, whatsoever.

If I was feeling as described in this post, I would take some time away from the internet.

I am using this to teach my 4 year old programming and general understanding of how computers process information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDR_paper_computer

We are still working on understanding more complex math concepts, but she understands general addition, multiplication and subtraction. Division has been a little harder.

But, I would say she generally understands how to process “code” written for the computer and write some of her own, really simple applications (with some heavy help from dad).

I’m thinking of sticking with this for a couple years, and then we are going to move to a small LMC that I wrote in C some time ago.

I’ve also thought about using FORTH, but I am probably getting ahead of myself a bit.

I wish I could help. The only thing I can say is my work agreement just says that anything I make using resources provided by the company (computers, servers, software, internet access) can be claimed by the company. However, if I use my own computer, software license, my own internet, outside of work hours and not on work premises, then it is mine.

I think the biggest difference might be that although I make software for my employer, my employer is not a software company. So the stuff I make is not sold or intended to ever be sold by the company for profit, but used by the company in their industry to make the work easier and more efficient.

The company I work for is also a part of a larger consortium with promises to share software between all of the organizations and companies to elevate the industry in which we work as a whole.

Hope some of that helps a bit, but I understand if it doesn’t.

Back when I was a freshman in college, I had a regular laptop (Sony Vaio) and at the time netbooks were popular and my girlfriend (now wife) had got me one for Christmas.

Win 7 starter was garbage, XP was fine, but not ideal. I ended up trying out Ubuntu netbook remix since it was supposed to be lighter on resources. At the time I was a pre med student and wanted something for knocking out documents, and reading papers with enough battery to get me until I had to go to work. The iPad wasn’t out yet so that wasn’t an option.

I had a ton of fun getting it working, even the Broadcom chip was a fun challenge. Once it was working, I just really liked the look and feel. I preferred the Unix file structure to windows as well as the terminal experience, using bash vs powershell.

I ended up writing a few programs and apps for myself specifically for that netbook, and it quickly became my primary way of interacting with a computer. I eventually ported my Sony over which had the challenge of writing a couple drivers to get some things working with minimal compatibility.

Following this, I switched from pre med to software engineering and eventually graduated with a degree and I have now been working with software and using Linux ever since. Even now, I am the sole Linux system administrator in the company I work for and manage a handful of servers and deployments.

I would go for mint.

I want to suggest something immutable, but even when I use it, I have just had some issues occasionally or when trying to get the one off software here and there.

Of all the people in my family, even elderly, mint has been the easiest transition and I have very rarely needed to perform any additional maintenance outside of doing updates for them here and there.

just for anyone curious, this does work, but it does seem to also remove some of the accuracy of the touch keyboard. Funny enough, the resizing jittery keyboard with suggestions is substantially more accurate and easier to type on than the stationary one. Grass is always greener I suppose. I reinstalled for now in hopes in the future I can have all of the features, without the keyboard resizing on its own.

I appreciate the lead. I struggled to find things that worked (admittedly didn’t look very hard). I’ll check it out tonight.

I’ve been using gnome fedora on my surface. What drives me nuts is the keyboard resize when it starts putting suggested words above the keyboard. Makes typing a pain in the ass. I can live with everything else, I just want to turn off the word suggestions. I cannot find a setting to disable it.

I run fedora 42 gnome on a surface pro 7+ that needed a new home. Great tablet. I do not like the touch screen keyboard resizing when I type to suggest words, but I haven’t found a way to address that.

Other than that, it has been great.

I would go Debian for stability.

I like fedora since it updates a little more frequently than Debian, but it isn’t a full on rolling release. I used opensuse tumbleweed for a while and it broke on me several times.

I also used arch for a while, but I’m a dad to young children and I just don’t have the time to fuck around with my OS anymore. When I have time to work on my personal dev projects, I just want to drop into tmux, launch neovim and go. After some distro hopping I landed on Fedora with KDE for my desktop and gnome on my laptop. I also have an old netbook running antix with iceWM and an old thinkpad running fedora i3. The latter 2 machines are my hard focus machines.

Came from Arch and OpenSuse. Fedora has been such a great switch. As I’ve gotten older and became a dad, my computer time at home is limited and I don’t have endless evenings to troubleshoot shit. Fedora has been stable for me for the last 4 years. I use the KDE spin.

Good to know that in another 30 years, I will still be doing the dumb shit I’ve been doing for the last 20.

It’s really a bummer seeing how much childish drama is in the Linux dev community.

I am not nearly a good enough dev to contribute to the Linux kernel, but I am working my way towards that point currently at night after my kids are in bed. Be the change and what not.

I turn mine off to save power when I’m not actively using it. I have a small 65 watt server that stays on all the time. Currently it has been up for 3 months or so.

I actually keep an old used smartphone for just these sorts of things.

I am planning on getting a small tablet to handle this. But, that will be a problem for a much richer MXX53.

I started on gnome. Used gnome for most of my linux life. However, after some memory and performance issues, I decided to try KDE. That was about 3 years ago and everything that handles it well and I use a GUI with has been moved to KDE.

I will check that out. Thanks!

I am unsure if the specs bear this out, but my personal experience has been that RDP’s compression and encoding leads to much smoother interactions with the remote machine, especially when there are a lot of windows or visuals on screen. My bandwidth utilization has been lower on VNC.

Using RDP I also meet CMMC guidelines, which is probably doable with VNC, but not as easily or without some additional work on my end to prove compliance. It’s also easier to convince my clients to allow me to work off-site using RDP as a trusted secure protocol. Less headache.

It’s been so long since I used windows at home. I switched in 2009.

I use it at work, so I would say RDP is probably my favorite feature I would miss at home. But for the most part I use ssh anyways.

I have some RHEL machines at work. They are used as VM hosts for windows VMs (CAD software). I set them up, but I also have a huge list of other apps and servers that I manage,develop and support, and so the person that wanted these mahines wanted professional services as an option if I am out or busy with other projects. Plus it allows us to offload liability for security if need be, whereas when I do it, there is anyone else to blame, legally speaking. ( Although so far we have not had a breach on my watch knocks on wood )

I just use fedora at home, I find the they are about the same and I personally wouldn’t pay for the additional services. The package manager is different, but that’s about it.