For active files, yes. I have three synced systems doing backups at different times of the day when they aren’t otherwise being used. In any reasonable scenario, I’d lose 8 hours of work at most. I don’t change my dotfiles enough to keep backups of those. Distinct from my backup of active files, I archive anything that I’ll keep long-term. That includes useful dotfiles, install lists for new systems, and a less granular set of old backups.
Kind of. I’ve been running Xbuntu for four years on a system with 1 gb ram total. Running XFCE, I’m using a little over 500mb of ram at idle. I could probably optimize that. If I switch to i3, I use around somewhere between 300 and 350mb of ram at idle.
Another option: Check out Ubuntu Core if you’re shooting for super-tiny and you are willing to use snaps instead of deb packages… It targets embedded systems, so it is designed to run on 250/500mb of ram depending on which version you pick. I’ve used it on a Pi before and their website indicates that it works on other architectures. It isn’t meant to offer a desktop experience.
Apparently, yes. I’ve never tried doing that with a live usb, but give it a shot and let me know how it works out for you.
You probably have much better hardware than my old tablet. My tablet was marketed as a $99 dollar Windows tablet and I got what I paid for. 1gb ram soldered to the board, a weak 64-bit atom processor with 32-bit efi. One micro-usb port that doubled as the charging port. It took a powered usb hub, a custom-modified installer, and a lot of patience to get that thing up and running. It still works!
Fedora would be a good starting point since it has a straighforward version of GNOME as its default DE. It would be a wise to try out the fedora live disk for a while to verify that the touchscreen works well before installing anything. If Tails worked on this laptop then Fedora should as well, but it doesn’t hurt to check before doing anything permanent.
System memory and processor speed may be bottlenecks on a touchscreen laptop that old. My 2014 touchscreen tablet runs linux, but it can’t handle GNOME or anything remotely touchscreen-friendly. Onscreen keyboard+tiling wm=awkward user experience.
I don’t have any solid data to back up my ‘significant portion’ comment above, other than the fact that I see a lot of active users on lemmy.ml who seem content with the leftist vibe on the server. Not a very good basis for making such a broad statement. Whoops!
It’d be interesting to dig deeper into the issue through polling or something similar, but this type of self-sorting is probably hard to capture. People who read the description and choose not to join aren’t around to vote in a poll and neither are people who get scared away by what they see. For other ‘apps’, it’d be possible to catch some data from the second category of people by exit-polling people who choose to delete their accounts.
Your question was probably rhetorical, but I went ahead and did a search since I didn’t know the background. From the AMA that I found it looks like two people developed Lemmy from scratch and their only financing was obtained through donations. I don’t blame them if they wanted to call dibs on the most obvious server name and make ground rules for it that appealed to them.
Founder effect, to a limited extent. The people who developed Lemmy started lemmy.ml, a server (aka instance) specifically for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”. This was the description that they chose for the server and a significant portion of the people who joined the server did so because of that description. Leftist is a political term.
By design, Lemmy can be pointed at different servers for different content. You can pull up https://join-lemmy.org/instances for some ‘approved’ servers. A given server could be right-leaning, centrist, or totally apolitical. It may be that you chose to join lemmy.ml because it seems to be the most active lemmy instance. It currently is, but it also happens to have a lot of users who are interested in politics.
Ultimately the answer to your question is “Because you linked up your app with a lemmy server that chooses to focus on politics.”
The Linux Command Line at https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php is a good resource. Well-written and structured in a fairly logical way. The primary focus is on doing things in bash on Linux but it also expands into related topics that aren’t strictly about bash, such as editing text files from the command line, using ssh to connect to remote computers, etc.
Installing an operating system is not a typical part of the computing experience. Buying something that has been pre-built it is the default for the vast majority of users outside of the Linux world.
I don’t personally know a lot of people who have tried installing Linux, but most of the people in that limited group made the mistake of trying to install directly on top of hardware that they hadn’t researched. I am not criticizing that mindset - I have been one of those people on more than one occasion.
Even on ‘successful’ installs, it isn’t uncommon for something to not work without additional steps. To be fair, the same often goes for vanilla Windows installs if you don’t have a bunch of device-specific driver packages ready. No big deal if it turns out to be a fingerprint reader or a webcam that needs a tweak, but a wifi or video card that doesn’t work by default is a huge problem for someone who hasn’t prepared for it.
Nowadays I try to do my research in advance and come to an install project fully prepared, but I’m glad that I don’t have to put an operating system on new, unfamiliar hardware on a regular basis.
This is actually a good first step for anybody who is trying out a new operating system. When I made the switch to MacOS for a few years, I had a checklist of tasks to learn before I pivoted away from Windows. There were ways to accomplish everything, but I had long since forgotten how long it took me to learn how to do things in Windows. For everything that was different, I had to fight muscle memory and a false expectation of simplicity. I had the same problem with BSD and Linux.
A lot of things seem simple because they build on things that we’ve already learned, but if you switch to a new operating system, some of the old building blocks are swapped out with something else. Experience is context-sensitive and simplicity isn’t always as simple as it seems.
Are you looking for fiction? It isn’t perfect, but the kobo store has information near the bottom of every book’s page letting you know what level (if any) of DRM that a book has, so you can factor that in to your purchase decision. For drm-free files, you can download epub files directly once you purchase. Outside of that, I use Project Gutenberg, Baen, and a few other niche publisher websites. Basically, if you want to purchase content that you can use freely you just have to make the best of a bad situation.
They both have their uses and have slightly different target audiences. My background: I run Arch on several computers, but I’m using Manjaro on a few as well. I have no complaints. For what it’s worth, I’m also running Debian-based distributions on some other devices.
Manjaro: Manjaro focuses on easy installation and desktop experiences that are useable from the outset. For example, the Manjaro Sway edition has a customized launcher for Sway that makes it great for people who are using a tiling WM for the first time. It isn’t the vanilla experience, but it is something that you can use without customizing. My installations had a graphical program installer available by default. Also, from my personal experience Manjaro is significantly easier to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi.
Manjaro is a rolling release distribution like Arch, but it has a vetting process for its repositories - the idea is that more bugs get caught on the front end at the cost of slightly delayed software releases. You may or may not want this. If not, Manjaro has testing and unstable branches that you can switch to - this would bring the timing of software version updates closer to what you get when you use Arch.
Overall, I would be more inclined to recommend Manjaro to a new user of Linux because it is easier to get started and the defaults cater to newer users. Rolling releases take a bit of getting used to, but Manjaro is a good first exposure to the concept.
Arch: Arch is great if you have your own configuration files to import or you want to start out with a clean, basic installation that you intend to customize. Installation can be fairly easy if you’re willing to use the Archinstall script that comes with the standard ISO. If you install Sway, you aren’t getting any of the customization that Manjaro offers. If you’re already familiar with your preferred window manager or have custom dotfiles, then this won’t matter. Fewer programs are installed by default, but you can install whatever you want from the command line.
Arch doesn’t hold back software releases like Manjaro does, so you get new versions of your favorite software very quickly. You also get to experience new bugs very quickly.
Overall, I would recommend Arch to more experienced Linux users that know how to customize their systems, want the newest possible versions of software, and don’t mind incidental bugs from time to time.
What a relief! The ‘find an approach that works for you’ mentality was one of the things that drew me to Linux in the first place.
I feel like ChromeOS and Android are examples of what you get if you go too far down the ‘platform’ road on top of the kernel. I’ve used both and I like one of them, but I’m glad that my computer isn’t running either.
Maybe, but I can’t help but wonder who would use it. Based on personal experience, I don’t think that ‘timid Linux-loving lawyer’ is a significant part of the lawyering population. It is a technologically conservative profession by nature - paper law libraries were a must-have for any significant firm well in to the 2000s and quite a few firms still have them.
Most lawyers treat their computers as a necessary evil. Windows is the default OS, with creatives and technical people gravitating towards Macs assuming that the firm supports them. There is a strong tendency among lawyers to spend money instead of time on technical issues. As a result, many firms grow dependent on niche proprietary software that is heavily marketed to lawyers: billing/timekeeping/voice transcription/firm management. The arguable good news is that thanks to SaaS taking over that realm of software, more and more of the proprietary stuff is available on Linux through any decent web browser. Less buggy, more up to date, lower switching costs.
If Linux ends up being pushed out to employees in law firm environments during my lifetime, it’ll be because someone handling the IT/software decisionmaking for a firm has made a compelling business case to go that route for some percentage of the firm’s computers. Anything that gets deployed would probably be based on something like Red Hat since corporate support isn’t optional in a lot of these environments.
On the small firm side of things, lack of time and inclination to mess around with a new operating system is probably the biggest barrier.
I get what you’re typing. It is a problem that I also have with a lot of ‘How to try Linux’ or ‘I tried installing Linux’ posts. Most people who use Windows at work got a fully-installed operating system with functional programs provisioned for them by IT. They didn’t have to install anything or troubleshoot edge cases. That kind of support can be done with Linux boxes, too.
As someone who has made a dozen or so tradeoffs to run Linux in a business environment, the real story is the ‘how’ of doing it, or the ‘how’ of delivering a straightforward computing experience to the other people in your workplace.
Sometimes career-specific workflow is hard to replicate with free software. As a lawyer (not the one in the article), Libreoffice is generally a decent replacement for MS Office, but it was challenging to find a reliable way to prepare documents for litigation with open source software. I need to put custom numbering on pages, add exhibit stamps, redact information, and flatten/convert/remove metadata from the pages so that nobody can see what was redacted. Adobe can do all of these things easily. They can all be done in Linux, but not as easily and not with a single tool. For a lot of jobs, this wouldn’t matter, but it is mission-critical for a lawyer who needs to protect client information. Lawyers don’t get any sort of IT training and it is beyond scope for most paralegals.
During the x11/wayland transition, there are some games that fail to launch if you’re running them in wayland. This is likely to improve, but it’s a good idea to have an x11 backup for games that crash. I use sway, but I keep xfce around for a few games that I don’t feel like troubleshooting.
Example in my current setup, any game that relies on unity runs just fine when I’m using xfce or i3, but won’t start when I’m running sway. Since it just takes a few seconds to switch to a different DE/WM, that’s what I’m doing for now. I’m sure that in a year or two it’ll all be smoothed out.
None of this stuff matters if your plan is to buy a new computer that is designed to run Windows 11 from the beginning. I’m just chiming in as someone who tends to buy power-efficient computers and use them until they break down. The upgrade path is a bit murky this time around.
I could change some EFI settings, buy a wifi TPM dongle or two and change some registry settings to force Windows 11 to install on a few of my computers, but Microsoft is not guaranteeing to update computers that are on the edge of acceptability. I’d rather pare down my windows boxes and start fresh with a new one a few years from now.
Not for performance reasons, really. Windows 11 looks and feels a lot like Windows 10. There are plenty of processors that won’t be supported that can outperform a lot of processors that will be supported. It isn’t about pushing graphics or running high-performance software. The TPM and Secure Boot have to do with security and encryption. There are other ways to do encryption, but this is what Windows is choosing. The other requirements (generation-based chip cutoffs) seem to be largely arbitrary.
I used it on a virtual machine when it was still being prepared by Microsoft. It ran well. I always install from scratch and typically only install MS office, so it felt roughly as lean as Windows 10 does.
Big problem: every computer in my house that was capable of running Windows 10 is flagged as not capable of running Windows 11, including virtual machines. All of them. There’s a huge hardware upgrade push this time around. TPM and Secure Boot settings are only part of it - there’s a minimum processor generation and I would also need to expand the virtual hard drive size of all of my virtual machines.
For my use case, it makes more sense to keep using Windows 10 for software that I need for my business and to focus on chipping away at that increasingly-small list. I’ll probably buy a new family laptop in a few years designed to run Windows 11. Everything else in the household will be strictly Debian/Arch-based by then.
It may sound a bit hacky, but there’s a web interface that you can use to control kodi from any other device on your network. Just enter the address and a logon that you set up and presto. There’s a default interface, but you can download some custom ones through the add-ons browser. It functions as a remote, plus you can scroll through your collection on your tablet/phone/laptop while watching/listening to something else on your tv. The main advantage over an app is that it will work on all of your devices through a web browser.
MuPDF viewer is a simple pdf/cbz viewer. One nice thing about it is how easy it is to open multiple documents at the same time. If you use your tablet for document review, this is a nice feature. The big downside is that the built-in file browser can’t access SD cards.
Ghost Commander is a dual-panel file manager that is useful if you move files around on your device fairly often. It supports SD cards, although write access can vary depending on Android version.
Termux is useful if you’re used to command-line tools. It supports bash, zsh, etc and the built-in package manager is good. I have successfully used ssh-related commands, vim, emacs, lynx, elinks, newsboat, cmus, mc, ncdu, and other programs from the desktop world on my android devices. Very useful, especially with Hacker’s Keyboard, which makes it easy to enter CTL, ALT and F1-F12 keystrokes on an Android Device.
Librera Reader is a very nice option for ebooks, comics and PDFs. It has read support for SD cards and works well with built-in text-to-speech if you like to have a robot voice read your books aloud to you while while you drive or work out. It reminds me a lot of Moon+ Reader, but it’s available on F-Droid.
Flym is a decent rss reader - I’ve been using it for a few years without incident.
VLC and Kodi are available through F-Droid if you’ve got a media collection on your device. Additionally, VLC can stream network-shared media if you’re on your home network and want to watch something that isn’t stored on your device. Also it can cast content if you have a chromecast on one of your TVs.
For gaming, you could download Dosbox or Scummvm (or add the Retroarch repository) if you have some old DOS games or you’ve downloaded some ScummVm-type adventure games from GOG and you want to play them on the go. The interface is a bit clunky but you can share the save files with your other devices using Syncthing.
Here’s a slightly more niche gaming recommendation - I’ve been enjoying OMW a lot lately. It’s one of several Android-focused ports of OpenMW that is available on F-Droid. With a bit of help from syncthing, you can play TES Morrowind on your PC and then pick up from the same spot later on your phone or tablet. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but it can be done! Who needs Skyrim when there’s an older, better alternative?
Vim is absolutely the right answer. No visual interface at all and easy to customize aesthetically by putting a few lines into .vimrc.
Learning curve: There is one, but it really isn’t that bad. Read a guide first because minimalist is not the same as instinctive. If you learn a bit about modes and specific commands before you get started, Vim is way easier to use than the hype would lead you to believe.
Of course, OP wants something without a lot of features. Vim has tons of features, although none of Vim’s advanced features are noticeable unless you read through :help or learn some extra commands. If you just learn basic navigation, mode-shifting, and HOW TO SAVE/EXIT, then you probably won’t find a more minimalist text editing experience. Except for ed.
For RSS, there are plenty of open-source options to choose from. Flym is a nice option for android. I personally use newsboat pointed to a terminal browser on my laptop, but that’s mainly due to my focus on text-based news consumption. I’m sure that there are much more traditional options out there.
I don’t think that brand matters much from a security standpoint, although I’d avoid any external drive with built-in wi-fi.
If you want a blend of privacy and convenience, one option may be to have more than one partition on your drive. On my portable SSD, I have one convenience/media partition that can be read by all of my devices: computers, tablets, windows computers. My financial/medical/business records are on a luks-encrypted second partition. I could probably have done something similar with bitlocker, but I’m much more likely to pull up my encrypted stuff on a linux machine.
Shell scripts usually expect something POSIX-compatible, but you don’t have to stick with the default for user-facing tasks. Fish, zsh, powershell, and a whole bunch of niche shells are available to try. Anyhow, in the broad context of Unix default installations bash has a lot of competition.
On several unix-like Oses more than one shell is used depending on context. A great interactive shell with loads of features may be overkill if you just want to execute a script. Some OSes don’t use bash at all.
FreeBSD uses tcsh as its default root shell, but it uses ash shell (sh, it started as a clone of Bourne shell) for users and as the interpreter for system commands. This combo confused me at first and led me down a shell research rabbit-hole. ash is a stripped down shell that aims to be small, fast, and largely POSIX-compliant.
In Ubuntu, bash is the default shell for interactive terminals, but dash is used to execute scripts by default. I think that dash started as a debian port of the ash shell.
MacOS and Kali both use zsh as the default shell. I don’t know what they use by default to run scripts, but I would guess that it isn’t bash.
Also, something that took me a while to figure out is that Bourne-Again Shell (bash) is not the same as Bourne Shell (sh). Further, sh does not always denote Bourne shell, but could be ash or dash or something else.