There are two potential show-stoppers.

1. Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.

2. Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.

It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.

If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.

Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.

If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).

Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.

This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.

FOSS projects are often labors of love.

Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.

And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!

Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.

Honestly, that sounds great.

My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it’s not always easy to tell what’s official and what’s just from some rando. I don’t want a repo full of “unverified” packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.

Distros can and should curate packages. That’s half the point of a distro.

And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can’t simply patch a library once at the system level.

I’m running a Fedora derivative and I wasn’t even aware of this option. I’m going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.

In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I’m as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.

If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.

This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.

Kids these days and their “Plasma”. BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!

I’m not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.

But also, from that link:

We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:

• KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
• As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community

So I don’t feel like it’s wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.

Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).

mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.

I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.

Laptops are a crapshoot, so I’d recommend sticking with distros that are known to support your specific model.

Desktops should, in general, just work.

That said, I’ve never personally had a seamless experience. There’s always something I need to struggle to configure. Usually it’s because I’m very picky and I like things to work MY way. The alternative on Widows would not be that it works my way; it would be that there’d be no way to do that so I’d just have to deal with it. If you’re willing to just roll with the defaults, then yeah, most basic things should just work.

The biggest gotcha is GPU drivers. Not all distros ship with recent kernel versions with modern drivers. You should be pretty safe with Fedora and derivatives.

This is probably the best solution I’ve found so far.

Unfortunately, even this is no match for the user-hostile design of, say, Microsoft Copilot, because it hides content that is scrolled off screen so it’s invisible in the output. That’s no fault of this extension. It actually DOES capture the data. It’s not the extension’s fault that the web site intentionally obscures itself. Funnily enough, if I open the resulting html file in Lynx, I can read the hidden text, no problem. LOL.

Right, not an IDE. The BB stands for “bare bones”, but it has a robust feature set as far as general text editing goes. Autocomplete is minimal so I tend to use an IDE for more complex coding tasks.

Sorry, I misspoke. CUPS itself is not deprecated, only most of its old functionality regarding drivers.

From man cups:

CUPS printer drivers, backends, and PPD files are deprecated and will no longer be supported in a future feature release of CUPS

I don’t. I have installed Firefox manually for many years across several distros now, albeit for different reasons. For example:

• Debian only has Firefox ESR in the Bookworm repo. I want the latest mainline version.

• Bazzite only offers it via Flatpak, which breaks functionality I need such as native messaging.

I see no problem installing it manually. It keeps itself updated and has caused me zero problems.

BBEdit.

It makes every other GUI text editor look like a joke.

macOS still uses cups. It’s deprecated but still functional. The alternative is to use AirPrint or get fucked.

Weight & Diet Trackers

I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.