This has been the story of Linux since the 1990s.

BSD does the same thing. They famously stuck at the gcc 4.2 series about a decade too long because of licenses.

Nothing new under the sun.

I don’t disagree. It comes fast. Take care of yourself my friend.

We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.

Ubuntu was a successful attempt to make Debian user-friendly. If you don’t remember Linux in 2003, it took a lot of time to configure.

Ubuntu came along and did everything automatically from first install. Some of the polish it had was things like smooth fonts, TrueType font support (remember old XFree86 Bitmap fonts?) a GUI installer, automatically detecting your monitor resolution, setting up sound automatically, and automatic downloading of firmware needed to make your hardware work. In just one reboot after install, you had a usable system that looked really nice, with smooth fonts.

In 2024, Debian already does all of this out of the box. The value add of Ubuntu is minimal. Ubuntu provides a theme, a splash screen when booting up, a custom font, and a modified version of the Dash to Dock extension that you can just download yourself from the Gnome extension site. That’s it. One might argue that snaps make Ubuntu worse than Debian.

Just use Debian. If you want a somewhat more polished system (nice cursors, unique icons, easy to configure animations), there is Mint Debian edition.

It takes less time to just set up Debian to look and behave like Ubuntu (about 10 minutes) than it takes to continually fight against Ubuntu snaps.

Just use Debian.

That thread is just the result of a search today to see if the situation has changed.

When I tried it, we were still trying to figure out how the two displays worked. It looks like that link has a solution. It would have been great to try back then, but I wouldn’t go out and buy a 5k iMac or LG monitor just to try it out now.

I never got it to work at anything over 4k several years ago.

I went down the rabbit hole and ended up just selling. Apple only ever released the driver for macOS and for Windows 10 with Bootcamp.

Apparently it will work in X11 with a few setup changes per this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=6477626#post6477626

About 25 years ago, I used something called mlvwm which was designed to look like System 7.

I ran this on a 486 and later on a Duron system with something called “bochs” that let me run a full System 7 in a container.

A quick search shows that it is still around and has been forked by a couple of people.

X1 Nano:

• narrower than the old 11.6 laptops and slightly taller.
• Higher than 1080 screen due to the taller ratio.
• IPS display
• 0.97kg without charger.
• Thinkpad keyboard and track point.
• strong Linux support

Here is the PSREF for the first generation. They are up to Gen 3 of this line now.

Agree; Gnome on Fedora is just more polished in general than Gnome anywhere else. So sasy to add another language and that input language works everywhere including Flatpak apps Qt apps, etc. Fedora is winning me over in this regard and I’ve kind of been a Red Hat hater these days.

After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.

My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.

The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.

I love the old Mac Pros and even built a trashcan setup for Debian a few years ago. But TBH, they use a lot of electricity for the processing power they provide. If you already have one or can get one for free, great, use it. Linux runs great. But I wouldn’t go to OWC and buy something that would be outperformed by a fanless, low TDP machine these days.

Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.

At the bottom in the

Education, Professional Development, & Credentials

section

Something like: Open Source Computer Science Coursework Completed XX hours of coursework through ABCD, EFGH, HIJK Universities Relevant Coursework: Linear Algebra (Princeton); Machine Learning (Stanford); Cryptography (Stanford)

It would weigh less than my traditional degrees, but if pressed on it (unlikely), I would describe exactly what this is: an effort to liberate CS education in the spirit of the Free Software movement, using synchronous and asynchronous learning methodology in an online learning platform from accredited, reputable universities.

At this point in my career, it would show continued aptitude for growth and professional development, since it’s been close to two decades since my first degree.

Also, at this point, I’ve seen people put shit like Strayer U and ITT Tech and Liberty on their resume and get hired for very high paying jobs. Honestly I would take this over that trash.

Even 15 years ago, most lower level undergrad coursework was 150+ students in a lecture hall where the professor would pull up Blackboard and just load the slideshow. It was only at the 300+ level where class size shrunk down and interpersonal relationships sort of mattered.

My wife’s graduate degree a few years later but still over a decade ago was almost entirely online; they only met in person to discuss their progress towards the capstone. And she has a nice prestigious degree with a very expensive university name on it, walked across the stage at that University, and nowhere does that diploma read, “Online.”

I have a lot of beef with the US university system. Change has to start somewhere.

How did I miss this five years ago? What an excellent idea. I think we should be able to just finish the coursework and then put it on our resume.

I love this idea so much. I’m established in my industry but I think I’ll start working on it and just add to my resume. Thanks for sharing.

Depending on the country, if they don’t give special preference to speedtest.net, they might just block it.

10.4 down / 3.13 up

Surprising that ThinkPads are only going to captive screws when Elitebooks had them 15 years ago.

Every Linux user should try Slackware at some point.

If they are competent with computers, they can probably figure out Ubuntu and maintain it theirself.

I left Ubuntu for systems I manage because I’m not smart enough or willing to invest time learning snaps, and snaps kept breaking Firefox updates and generally made Firefox unusable. Since I’ve been around a while, I found it was just easier to migrate my fleet to Debian and set it to look like Ubuntu with the dock on the left. This has been fine since 2022.

If it’s something you would be partially managing, and they didn’t like Mint, have them try Pop!_OS.

If it’s a super simple, low maintenance desktop, just go Fedora Silverblue and it will stay solid and up to date until the hardware dies.

NFS and Minetest (Asuna) server.