“I’ve been considering installing Arch the traditional way, on my X220, as a way to force myself to improve.”
I use Arch and so does my wife (she has no idea). The wiki is legendary because it is well used (I’ve written a few bits myself). I’ve used Gentoo for quite a while too but you will find compilation times a bit of a bore.
I own an IT company - I am the MD. I use Arch actually! (and so does my wife)
A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That’s what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same “drive mappings” to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I’ve written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their … issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
Windows’s package managers are MS only (ish). msiexec is a bit of a convoluted pain compared to apt, yum, pacman or even portage.
When you update a Linux box, everything is updated not just the OS. That is not the case on Windows where each browser, pdf viewer etc has its own updater service or not.
I’ve been doing IT software monkeying for several decades for many companies, some of which you will have heard of. Trust me: the Windows model is not the best. It certainly should not be a reason to fear Linux.
Most distros have a “Politely notify that some updates are available, would you mind awfully if I install them?” … cracks on in the background and then suggests a reboot only if the kernel was updated.
Start off with Thingiverse or similar. I recommend something like: www.thingiverse.com/thing:3553160 There are a lot of models there - those are .STL that you “slice” and send to your printer. There is this: www.thingiverse.com/thing:2187167 which is CAD models with the working left in - OpenSCAD in this case. You load it up, generate a .STL and then pass that to the slicer.
I have a large plastic cabinet in my garden for storing a lawn mower etc. The hinges died years ago. I have printed new ones. At least 20kg of plastic waste has been avoided being dumped a lot longer. I am well aware (now) that I should not have bought the bloody thing in the first place!
If you go the OpenSCAD route, you might like this: github.com/JustinSDK/dotSCAD - the author sadly passed away recently but his work is legendary in my opinion.
Once you get printing sorted out, then move on to your own stuff. … or not - give it a go! I have a large bag of very strangely shaped PETG experiments that went badly wrong and need recycling.
So you “make config” once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.
I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry’s lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.
make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel’s options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven’t done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don’t miss those days.
In the old days (I’m 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I’d have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don’t have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn’t see them unless I wanted to.
This really isn’t the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.
On a desktop/laptop system you soon notice when things like your touchpad loses multi touch support and USB sticks no longer work because your kernel mods no longer match the “old” kernel!
needrestart and co are really handy. When lsof first came out, I remember finding a recipe similar to the one posted and “mind blown”!
I gave up about 5.5 years ago after 30 odd years of pretty heavy tabbing. Fags costed about £10.50 for 20 L&B back then and no doubt the beer accumulator model has raised that to at least £13 by now.
Price was not my primary reason for giving up but I can see how it will help. When I started I could buy 10 packs duty free for £5 and smoke on the plane. The UK old 10p (which was basically a two shilling coin rebadged as 10p) was about the same size as a German 1DM piece. DM - Deutsch Mark. Good enough to fool the removed dispensers in West Germany, back in the day. At the time (mid '80s) there was roughly 4DM to £1 and a pack was about DM2.50 from a street vending machine.
As well as price, we need to realise that nicotine is not the only addictive thing in a ciggie. If it was, then patches, gum etc would just work. They don’t really work very well on their own and you can’t shift the blame onto habit either. I don’t think that nicotine is particularly addictive at all.
Giving up is hard, really hard. It needs will power. When I started giving up I was wheezing rather badly and had a very persistent cough that lasted for about nine months to the point that even I realised I had to do something.
I stopped at around 17:00 one friday evening and had a very long lie in on sat morning. That got me half a day. I hung on until saturday evening and went to bed. I now had managed a day. Another long lie in on sunday. Hang on in there and get to monday. Now I have two days. Then I managed a week, then two weeks, then a month, then two months, three months, half a year, a year.
After a few days I realized I could perhaps do this. I don’t exactly know why I decided to come up with a “mantra” that I would say to myself whenever I craved a ciggie but it really helped. “I don’t want to smell and I don’t want to die” was what I settled on and it really worked for me. Even a smoker knows really how bad they smell and the other wish is a bit obvious!
After about a week my sense of smell and taste went berserk! I could smell people entering a room which was a bit disconcerting. I recall it being similar to when I finally caved in and got some specs sorted out for my eyes. It has calmed down since to “normal”.
If you want to give up then you will need a strategy. I was weak willed enough to need a near death like experience to kick me into some form of action. Giving up fags is a horribly complicated affair and the “treatments” on offer are probably bollocks. I tried a vape and soon realised that it won’t help at all - I’d just replace smoking with … something else that doesn’t really cut it.
I found that as soon as I said my mantra, the cravings really did vanish, for a few minutes, then hours, days. weeks etc. I also had some pretty odd dreams involving fags. Before I gave up, I never smoked in my dreams. I did have several dreams after giving up which involved smoking in some pretty bizarre ways!
Finally: I saved roughly £3,500 per year at 2018 prices by not tabbing. It’s probably more like £4000-4500 now.
Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.
I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that’s another story.
A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:
I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: “Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs”. FF has a slightly less opinionated “Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work”. I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers
I’ve returned to FF after a very long time and I don’t regret it at all. I run Arch actually!
I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)
I’ve seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I’m UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don’t really innovate - they buy it.
Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.
If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn’t do anything special for OWA it’s just yet another Google browser.
I only use Reolinks these days. RLC-410 - some dome and some bullet. Cheap and easy to setup. I’m a long term Zoneminder user which I get to watch the low res stream and record on the high res stream. My ZM is a VM on VMware with a cheap Nvidia GPU passed through for CUDA. This still works: wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare but I should probably bring the wiki page up to date.
I have a Reolink door bell too - I went for the PoE one. It’s a lot better than my old Doorbird but not as sturdy. The door bird could drive a chime too which was nice. The Reo can’t but it is a PoE powered unit with a UPS backing the switch. That’s pretty resilient.
They never get to see the internet. I fiddle DNS so that pool.ntp.com points at my ntp daemons but I run an IT company so that might be a bit excessive for most! I have three Pis with GPS hats and antennae.
As you say, they are well supported by HA too. If you have a Coral and Frigate then you have lots of options. Just keep them away from the internet if you are concerned about who is looking through them apart from you.
Never used Flatpak or Snap in nearly 30 years of using Linux. I might one day but not yet.
I don’t use Fedora these days but your package manager will probably have some hooks. Add one to update your Flatpaks when it has finished its main job.
“The ban - which covers all spaces in North Somerset open to the public”.
I live in South Somerset (Yeovil) but since the county went even more bizarre and decided to amalgamate into some mad centralised Somerset County thingie instead of the old Somerset regions. who knows what this ruling even means?
@mex - fix the title to note coverage only applies to North Somerset (whatever that is). It’s shitty to imply something that doesn’t apply to the vast majority of a county, let alone the country.