Nice.

Lol, I wouldn’t even use MS Office on Windows, Libre Office all the way.

Happy birthday! KDE is my favorite DE and it just keeps getting better every year!

Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.

About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)

Snaps are a standard for apps that Ubuntu’s parent company, Canonical, has been trying to push for years.

The issue that most people have with them, is that Canonical controls the servers, which are closed source. Meaning that only they can distribute Snap software, which many Linux users feel violates the spirit & intention of the wider free and open source community.

Appimages and Flatpaks are fully open source standards, anybody can package their software in those ways and distribute them however they want.

.deb files are software packaged for the Debian distribution, and frequently also work with other distros that are based on Debian, like Linux Mint.

I’ve been rolling Debian more and more this year. If you’ve got solid Linux chops, it’s really great.

I also really like LMDE, it’s what I run on my Business laptop.

I love Mint, it has become my workhorse distro. I use LMDE on my personal business laptop. I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Mint earlier this year, and it’s been great on their very old and low power desktop.

Cinnamon is not the prettiest or slickest DE, but damn if it ain’t the most stable DE I’ve used.

I’m a KDE fanboi myself, but when I spin up a machine that I need to just work in a super dependable way and is no muss, no fuss, I usually choose Mint with Cinnamon.

I’ve slowly been decorating my IT office with various Linux trinkets.

I just got a foam stress “ball” Tux recently, and I plan on getting a Debian coffee mug, maybe some Linux/FOSS related stickers lol.

Ventoy folders are next on my list :D

I recently submitted to the Ventoy path, can’t believe it took me so long.

I actually thought I had messed something up after burning it on a USB. The drive mounted an empty folder and I thought, “no way it’s that simple, I don’t just drop the ISOs into the folder do I?”

Yes, you just throw all your ISOs into that folder, unmount, and you’re good to go!

In my experience, Linux folks are just happy to find each other in the wild.

Hell, I’m just happy to meet people that are Linux-curious lol.

It’s mostly online that the distro wars are fought.

?..It’s a great tool that provides all the security of VPN access without having to struggle with the more technical aspects of spinning up your own VPN, and it’s zero cost for personal use.

You could also use Netbird if you wanted, but I have been using Tailscale extensively and it’s awesome.

IP white lists and firewall exceptions will help, but exposing ports on your home router is almost always a bad idea, especially for something as trivial as a game server.

I would highly recommend Tailscale. It’s free for up to 3 users, and if you have more friends than that, I would have them all sign up with free accounts and then share your laptop device with their tailnets.

It’s very easy to setup and use, costs nothing, and will be far more secure than opening ports and trying to set up IP white lists, protocol limitations, etc.

Tailscale creates something called an “overlay network” it’s basically a virtual LAN that exists on top of your real network and can be extended to other people and devices over the internet. It’s fully encrypted, fast, and like I said, very easy to set up.

You got me!

No, they’re hardcore because tiling WMs are hardcore. Most users don’t want to use them, they don’t care. And they wouldn’t be significantly more likely to use them if more distros had them as a default.

Y’all complain that users still occasionally need to use the terminal for certain tasks on Linux, but you think those same users will be totally interested in spending hours writing Perl or JSON configs and memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts for every function they used to use the mouse for??

Hot take alert:

This is a stupid opinion.

First, the article reads like an AI wrote it, but assuming that’s not true, the Linux space absolutely does NOT need more tiling window managers.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed there are still as many actively developed ones as there are.

The VAST majority of Linux users have little to no interest in a tiling WMs, and the basic tiling features of Plasma, Gnome, and soon Cosmic are fine for most of the users that want to try it out. The few that really want hardcore full tiling are almost always already very experienced power users who know what they want and how to get it. They aren’t going to be put off by their favorite distro not having built in support for tiling WMs.

In fact, most of them are already using distros that are able to be heavily customized to their liking, like Arch, NixOS, and Gentoo.

How many users do you think want to run Linux Mint or PopOS but with some hardcore tiling WM?

Linux has a massive amount of variety in all areas, it’s already hellish for new users to pick a distro from the forest of suggestions, do we really need even more tiling WMs on tip of the dozen+ ones that already exist and serve a tiny percentage of Linux users?

Eh, bring it all on. Part of what is great about FOSS is the vibrant ecosystem. I welcome new stuff, even if I don’t have much use for it.

I do think it makes a lot of sense for certain use cases. Like my Steam Deck, great use case for an immutable distro.

Another is school or work deployments where you just need a herd of identical, generic systems or thin clients that run the same small set of applications.

I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.

Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.

For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.

So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.