I am a Meat-Popsicle
I keep a root folder. On Windows it’s in c:\something on Linux it’s in /something
Under there I’ve got projects organized by language. This helps me organize nix shells and venvs.
Syncthing keeps the code bases and synced between multiple computers
I don’t separate work from home because they don’t live in the same realm.
Only home stuff in the syncthing.
Running Ubuntu on my 2015 air I struggle to get 2 hours out of it. I was able to get TLP to bring it close to 4, But it was at the cost of being borderline unusable.
Great, now we’re not going to catch the next zero day compression vulnerability. :)
I used enlightenment for something like a decade. When Gnome hit the big time I used Gnome because it looked Nice and was very flexible. I went back to Mac and Windows Land for a bit, when I came back I went Gnome again. I just screw around for a day looking and picking plugins and fighting with it to get it exactly how I wanted it. After fighting with one of the older plugins that mustn’t doing what I wanted to do I saw somebody mentioned using KDE. I tried KDE and sure enough every single thing I was plugging the hell out of Gnome for was a default setting in KDE. I’m currently running Plasma. I must say that Cinnamon’s not bad either.
Realistically with that screen size you could put anything in that thing. How do you get the impression that it might be a little smaller than it looks though.
I you’re going to hack one, this one is much cooler
https://www.ebay.com/itm/186640570101
there’s a teardown here:
https://hackaday.com/2020/04/27/teardown-vtech-whiz-kid-luggable-computer/
Each distro picks the things it likes the things it doesn’t like and it combines what it wants into a working operating system. Maybe they make some of their own custom stuff, maybe they just borrow other people’s stuff.
Debian, up until the last couple of revisions, was very big on choosing* only free things. If you wanted to use any non-free products you had to jump through small hoops. So Ubuntu took Debians core, and rewired it to properly support free things making installation and maintenance on newer hardware much easier. Because it was so much easier, they got a huge support community, and became the default for a lot of people just starting out. But then the guys that run Ubuntu also made other decisions, like trying to monetize some of the aspects or pushing for the use of different package managers that people don’t love. Mint came along and kind of filled the gap in between Ubuntu’s up sides and downsides and became the easy default for a lot of people. In the midst of all that turmoil, Debian slipped in their own version of making non-free software seamless. A lot of the support thrown into Ubuntu and Mint also helps Debian.
Red hat, fedora, and centos have the same kind of story going on, But it’s much less exciting and more about support and payments.
The next thing you hear about* is immutable operating systems. Like Fedora Silver Blue or NixOS*. They’re extremely secure, because you’re not allowed to make changes to the operating system blindly while it’s running, But it complicates just about everything you do in the name of security.
The other things you mentioned were window managers. (Gnome, KDE…) They’re basically affecting the look and feel of the GUI for the operating system. It’s your right click and your start menu and your window shades at the top and how windows are moved and snapped and organized. KDE looks and works by default a lot more like Windows, Gnome has a rather flexible plug-in system in tons of plugins available. Most of the other window managers are designed for low memory usage.
Another thing you’ll run into is X-Windows and Wayland. They mainly deal with backend internals of how the gui does its work. X Windows is ancient and compatible with just about anything that was ever made, Wayland is a bit flashier a little more efficient, and a little more secure, But at the same time it has a lot of compatibility issues with new hardware. Like if you’re going to run auto hotkey you’re going to have a harder time getting it to run under Wayland.
If you’re running on an x86/64 PC you can choose whatever you want, with the lion’s share of tech support being available for Debian variants (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint)
If you’re running on Mac, some distros are better supported.
If you’re running on a Raspberry pi you’re usually best going with one of the ones they recommend.
When someone says that an application is tested to work with a certain distribution, if most likely can work or be coerced to work with most of the other distributions, But the developer designed it under and tests it under whatever distribution they recommended regularly. So don’t be surprised if you choose something else and you have to fight with it a bit to get it to work or in rare cases it doesn’t work at all.
$500 might be a stretch, It weren’t for the horrible keyboard, and horrible screen, it might be worth putting a raspberry pi into as a sleeper project.
Yes I realize it’s a joke.
It’s about right for the price.
If they have $380 and what a $380 computer it will serve.
You can probably add an iPad and an Android tablet there too.
Or if you like beating your head against a brick wall constantly NixOS is really hard to brick. Any update that fails can just be reverted with a reboot.
Of course the downside is poor documentation, and nothing at all works like you expect it to work. It’s like hey, you want to learn Linux again from scratch? And by the way no two things work the same.
And if it’s a Dell, set disk access from raid to AHCI.
I literally had to do this 2 days ago.
Well it is now…
Or just bury another line. Connect to speaker to each end, put a small mic/amplifier/push button on each end
;)
If you can find landline phones with that feature set, just get them. You can just wire them together and put 20 volts DC in the line. Of course you’re not going to want to do that over your single ethernet run but if you had multiple…
Telephone services really simple, 18 to 24 volts on hook should pull down to about eight or nine volts when you open the line. If you pulse a 90 volt signal, It will cause them to ring.
Yeah that’s the problem, there are corporate options for corporate prices, but home intercoms have more or less disappeared with the advent of cell phones that everybody just has on them anyway.
I just put Amazon devices in most of the populated areas of the house and use broadcast, but honestly we rarely use them it’s a lot easier just to text somebody.
One might consider getting some older phones mounting them in locations bringing power to them and running walkie talkie software.
Look into asterix
https://www.voip-info.org/asterisk-paging-and-intercom/
You should be able to pick up voip phones relatively cheaply these days with all of the commercial offices going to remote.
I kind of like that aspect of it… Is that wrong?
An u until live CD will find my decade old HP laser and print to it without any work.
Getting my NIXOS to print at the same printer? About an hour.
Home assistant Web app would be fine.