Immutable distros are great for applications where you want uniformity for users and protections against users who are a little too curious for their own good.

SteamOS is a perfect use case. You don’t want users easily running scripts on their Steam Decks to install god knows what and potentially wreck their systems, then come to Valve looking for a fix.

Immutable distros solve that issue. Patches and updates for the OS roll out onto effectively identical systems, and if something does break, the update will fail instead of the system. So users will still have a fully functional Steam Deck.

If you’re not very technical, or you aren’t a power user and packaged apps like Flatpaks are available for all your software, then go for it. I prefer to tinker under the hood with my computers, but I also understand and except the risk that creates.

Immutable distros are a valuable part of a larger, vibrant Linux ecosystem IMO.

Glad I’ve never used it.

…You are considering abandoning Libre Office because it doesn’t auto-capitalize after line breaks?

history | grep command you’re searching for

That will return all commands you’ve typed that contain that keyword. Helps if you remember part of a command, but can’t remember the specific flags or the proper format.

If there are common commands that you use over and over, turn them into a Bash script and name the script something descriptive.

I do that for long commands that I don’t want to type out, like my whole system update workflow: sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

I saved that as a Bash script and called it “update.sh” then I saved it in my home directory. Now whenever I want to do a full system update, I just type ./update.sh and it asks me for my password, then updates my whole system without me having to do anything else. I do this with several different tasks like my remote Ansible server updates.

Other than that, you can buy/make a linux command cheat sheet with the most common commands. Keep it with you or next to your computer. Look at it whenever you need a refresh.

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

Default terminal -> Kitty

I’ve really been enjoying Fish on my personal laptop.

No rivalry, both projects serve a different crowd with different use cases and preferences. Some people like both, some people like neither, that’s the beauty of Linux and FOSS, there’s something for everyone.

Filthy, janky, lovely! Merry Christmas and happy holidays you stinky lil’ penguin! 🎄🎉🎁☃️❄️

I love it. I run Mint on my business laptop and my personal laptop, it’s so solid. And Cinnamon has been the most stable desktop environment I’ve ever used.

Linux Mint. I’m a pretty hardcore Linux person, used a dozen different distros, Mint is by far the closest I’ve experienced to #JustWorks.

It’s reliable and simple enough that earlier this year I switched my tech-illiterate parents from Windows to Mint. Works great for them so far.

The penguin is merciful.

In the same spirit, yeah. It has a pretty active community from what I’ve heard.

Had basically the same exact scenario with my parents earlier this year.

Installed Linux Mint with the default Cinnamon desktop, installed a “Windows” theme. Put icons on the desktop exactly where there old ones were, and never looked back.

It’s been great for them, does everything they need and took minimal effort from me to set up.

It’s the ease if use. In Windows, you select an option called kiosk mode, select a user account or create one to use, then tell Windows what webpage/site URL to use for the locked down browser interface. Then you click go and that’s it.

You have a locked down, reasonably secure single-use kiosk for your Company HR portal, in-house web app, or training portal, literally takes less than 5 minutes, and is so simple, I could walk a non-techie through the whole process easily over the phone.

Things like cage are already more technical and tough to setup than that, by a large margin.

It’s great if you need something more powerful, or you want a bunch of kiosks that you can roll out on a low power SBC. But for one-off basic kiosks that use a little mini-tower, Windows kiosk mode is pretty great.

Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

It’s the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.

😆

Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS here. Been using for about a year and a half, and loving it.

Modern web engines are basically mini operating systems. Long gone are the days where a web browser just needed to render basic HTML pages, handle some simple protocol actions, and render images.

To build something that supports all of the latest web standards, is secure, is always up to date, and on top of all that, is performant, requires a large group of very skilled devs working constantly on all those components.

Web development, for better or worse, has become a massive and rapidly evolving ecosystem that is constantly morphing and changing. Web apps are becoming the standard, and even “simple” modern websites are absolutely filled with different widgets and frameworks for all the different elements they contain.

If a very large/rich org or company decided to dedicate a whole team of devs to build a FOSS web engine, it could happen, but that used to be Mozilla, and look how that has slowly been failing.

What person with a website that has any significant traffic would willingly break it for 80+ percent of its users? That will never happen, sadly.

Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.