#Linux. LibreOffice. Just use them. They are so much better

[thewolfofthestars]

I finally got a new laptop! Yay! My geriatric 8-year-old can finally be sent to the retirement home (aka gathering dust in the closet because what if I need it later). And now I can run programs and perform tasks without it taking a dog's age! :D

But I did notice something in getting everything set up.

I've been a staunch Linux lad since I was very little--one of the few things my father and I actually agree on. And the new laptop came pre-installed with Windows 11, as most new non-Macs do, so I decided to partition a bit of the drive for it rather than wiping it completely, just in case I need Windows compatibility for school or work stuff, even if I spend the majority of my time in Ubuntu. (I had wanted to do that with my old machine, actually, but something went horrendously wrong in the process and it took two days to fix and my laptop briefly did not have a functioning OS on it at all lol.)

Now, I find Windows... unpleasant to use. And obviously part of that is just that I'm not familiar with it--the last time I had Windows on a personal computer was when I was 6 years old, and that thing ran Windows 2000 with a genuine CRT monitor and it was not connected to the internet and I spent my time playing King's Quest and MS Paint. I don't know where things are anymore, and the UX seems pretty uninterested in telling me.

Another issue is, of course, how bloated with ads and spyware it's become in recent iterations. I see where people are coming from when they decide to stick with Windows 7 or Vista or some other older version, even if I disagree with them for security and malware reasons--"person on previous version of Windows" is by far the largest and juiciest target for all manner of bad actors online.

But I think a really big core part of the problem is this: modern Windows is speaking a different language than I am. And the language it's speaking is that of phones, not of computers.

I only spent enough time on Windows to get it set up and strip away all the permissions I possibly could, and in that time I could tell: the default user Microsoft is designing this system for is people who are more familiar with Android and Apple than they are with a desktop computer. They made me log in with my email, rather than creating a device-specific profile. When I created my password they didn't even call it a password, they called it a "Hello Windows PIN". The format of the Settings page UI is nigh-identical to the one on my phone, right down to the list of access permissions siloed away by app (and yes, everything is called an app--no programs, no functions, no systems, no app*lications*, nothing else). I had to check a specific box to be able to look through my entire computer's file system, for crying out loud, rather than just browsing my Pictures and Downloads!

Hey, Windows! My laptop! Is not! A phone! And I don't want it to be! This is a computer OS for people who hate computers and I. HATE IT!

[kitkatt0430]

Free software recommendations for various things:

LibreOffice - A full home office suite comparable to Microsoft Office. Easy to use and you can choose the UI layout from several types; it can handle docx and other Microsoft Office document formats; it still does not include AI unless you specifically add that extension on purpose, so unlike other office suites it's not shoving AI down your throat.

Calibre - Ebook manager bundled with an ebook editor and ereader software. It can follow news feeds, downloading them into epub format. Convert ebooks from one format into (many) others. Run a server to make access your books from different computers/phones/tablets easier. And so much more... without even touching on the additional functionality that plugins can add. With plugins it can be used for DRM stripping (which can still remove DRM from even Kindle ebooks, if you have a kindle that you can download the ebook to and use to transfer to your computer). It can also handle downloading fanfics and their metadata using the FanFicFare plugin. (Which I've written tutorials about.) There are officially supported plugins (like FanFicFare) that are easy to install and unofficial plugins (like the DRM stripper) that take more work, so it's extremely customizable.

Syncthing - Want to host your own local file backup system? Have an old laptop that you can reformat with a linux distro? And maybe a spare hard drive? Perfect, you have what you need to set up a home file backup system. Reformat the computer with the new operating system, install syncthing on that computer and on the computer you want to back up files for and the two installations of the software can sync over your home network. Put it on your phone and back up your photos. The software is open source, encrypted, and you can turn it off so that your computer (or phone) is only running it on a trusted network. You control where the synced data lives, which computers on your network those synced folders are shared with (allowing for sharing between multiple computers) and even what type of file backups happen if data is, say, accidentally deleted. (File recovery!!!)

Plex or Emby - Both are free to install on any computer, point at any movie/tv show/audiobook/music files you've got sitting around, and bam you've got a home media streaming server. Both have paid tiers for more features (including tv tuner integration to act as a DVR), but what they can do for free is already impressive and well handled. Both have easy to use UI and it largely comes down to personal preference as to one is better than the other.

Notepad++ - A notepad type program that can also serve as a decent lightweight code editor. I use it for noodling around with code scripts and snippets, writing lists, and various other small tasks. It's not something I'd use for my professional code writing but it's great for just messing around with something on my own time.

[autolenaphilia]

It's remarkable how easy Linux Mint is to use, compared to Linux's general forbidding reputation. It was really easy to set up for me who has no coding knowledge. I had to fiddle with the boot order in my BIOS a bit but no biggie. Follow the installation guide on the website, and you will be fine. You can boot from an USB too, and test out the OS before installing it and wiping your drive. Transfer data to an external drive before you do.

And you probably won't have much trouble once it is installed either. The default settings are reasonable, and can be changed. It's a very easy to use OS. I have had no problems doing most of the ordinary things I use an OS for. My most used programs on Windows was already things like Firefox, VLC media player and Libreoffice on windows, and they function just as fine on Linux Mint (and are indeed installed by default).

Gaming has given me some trouble, but honestly Lutris has solved most of them. Granted I run mostly so old games on this laptop that Scummvm and dosbox is a solution for many of them. And installing 32 bit libraries has solved others (running the command in this link in the terminal solved so many issues alone). I play very old games, if you can't tell.

Sure, part of how Mint is so user-friendly is that it imitates Windows graphical user interface. But to be honest, it does mean users coming from Windows are already used to the interface. And Mint imitates only the parts of it that work, like the taskbar. And Microsoft has had a bad habit of making the gui look like a phone or a tablet for years now, so Mint does a Windows-like gui better than Windows at this point.

Mint is better than Windows in being a user-friendly operating system in general. Windows being spyware and full of bloatware is well-known and LInux gets away from that bullshit. And just how polite MInt is about updates is a massive improvement. No forced reboots here while an update takes ages to install.

Mint is a long-term support distro, which means it focuses on stability over the latest updates to packages and programs, introducing updates not when they are first released, but after a while when any bugs have been ironed out. And that improves the OS's stability a lot, which I value over getting bleeding edge updates. If you want updates as soon as they happen, and are willing to tinker a bit to fix things, there are other distros which use a rolling-release model.

It is less demanding on the hardware without compromising functionality. Like the majority of Linux distros takes up way less space on the drive and less memory compared to Windows, you can get more life out of an old computer this way.

There are so many older computers that still function fine hardware-wise, but since the specs on that hardware are too weak to switch to a newer more-resource hungry version of Windows, the machines are abandoned because the OS ends up unsupported and unsafe to use. Windows 10 support is going to end in 2025, it might be extended, but the end of w10 support is going to be a blood bath for this very reason. So many computers can't meet the specs for Windows 11 that the switch will be painful. And I would urge you if you are affected by this to upgrade to a LInux distro instead of getting a new computer just for windows 11.

[studentbyday]

hello, i drafted an aesthetic studyblr post for today, but didn't feel like posting it bc today is an ugly rant kind of day. (more kermits under the cut)

AAAAHHHHHH STUPID FREAKING WINDOWS- 😩😫😭🤬🤬🤬 so i was working on my laptop for these past few days which uses a different ms office version from the computer i switched to today and all my work was LOST!! 😭😭 all the notes i took on OneNote (at least it was just the psyc notes i had done on the laptop - idk what i would do if biochem or mol bio notes were lost. i'd probably cry for real) and all the work i did on that biochem paper? GONE!! my brother uses LibreOffice so i finally switched to that (altho their UI isn't that nice). at this point, i might as well switch to linux (unless that would cause unforeseen problems if i still sometimes do work on windows? idk) 😅 any recs for free notes apps that have a small learning curve and are OneNote-like?

the STRANGEST part is, some of the notes and lost files came back as i was working?? i didn't do anything and i *swear* i wasn't seeing things, so like, WTF??? not that i'm complaining. i hope the entire week of psyc notes i lost comes back. if not, i'll probs rewrite them if i have time. i hope i have time. i really hate this.

also, good thing i didn't like the way i wrote the biochem paper so far. i rewrote the thing in a google doc instead just to be safe and i like the way it flows much better now. AND!!! it's super annoying that i had to do this, but my handwritten notes on the main article i'm basing my paper on were confusing me. like, in terms of the flow of the biochemistry. so i basically rewrote those notes, doing this huge web in paint and idk if i could've done that on the first read instead of the way i did it. i hate feeling like i've done double work.

after rewriting the paper (i'm not even done yet - there are several things i wanna add yet and some facts i wanna clarify) and my notes on the article for said paper, i was exhausted. i tried to switch gears by reading the instructions/background for the biochem discussion post due tmr (that i was supposed to write today 😒) but i don't get it. it's like i didn't cover lipoproteins at all! i don't remember anything! what am i here* for if i can't remember anything?!

update: i answered 1 question for the discussion post. i still have to answer 1 more but i need to finish reading the background info first.

ALSO! i was supposed to study for 6+ hours today. i have no idea how long i actually studied bc i kept stopping and starting the study with me video and i worked through the breaks anyway, so the dinging timers were just annoying.

*"here" as in at uni, studying, although if in the right mood, it could also expand to my entire existence 🙂 (luckily i'm too angry rn to feel philosophical 😒)

okay, let's try not to end so sour. good things that happened today:

physio exercises ✅

skincare ✅ (i have added lip balm to the list asides from lotion bc the chapped state hurts 🙁)

mol bio quiz ✅

journal ✅

tomorrow will be better. and if it doesn't start out right, imma fight it until it is and i won't be defeated 😠

[globodamorte]

hiii so as you probably know I recently got a PC that I refused to get Windows on!! Here's my thoughts about it:

I personally got the Linux Mint distro, which I heard was pretty friendly to new users! This is true. There are a lot of well-written, detailed and clear guides about installing the Operating System (OS), and tons of YouTube tutorials as well. Once you have it installed, I think the OS itself also does a great job at walking through what you should do and how to get started and so on. If you mostly use your PC for web browsing and typing documence, you may never need to open up the terminal.

Unfortunately, I think if you have zero coding or computer science background it is going to be intimidating if you DO want to do other finagling. It would be really great if you had a friend you felt comfortable calling, who perhaps already uses Linux, feels reasonably competent and would not mind helping you through certain snags. (I would not mind being this person but I must make it clear that I don't think I qualify for the "reasonably competent" bullet point.)

If you have special programs specifically for work/whatever that isn't supported by Linux, there are lots of different workarounds, but I think they're all kinda soggy and not fun to do. For Clip Studio Paint, I ended up getting a virtual machine that I ran Windows 10 on, and then used CSP in that. But I also had to jump through hoops to get the virtual machine to detect my tablet and so on.

If you are scared of jumping directly into Linux completely and totally abandoning Microsoft, you can put both OSs on one device. I will say, going from Windows to Windows + Linux is FAR FAR FAR FAR easier than Linux to Linux + Windows, and the vast majority of tutorials out there is about going Microsoft -> Linux. I say this specifically because I put Linux in my new PC and then realized I still needed Microsoft for CSP, and realized it was a crazy crazy pain to do (hence my virtual machine solution)

No idea about gaming. I have heard that many games are not really supported on Linux, but also SteamDeck runs on Linux? So I think even if it's tough right now it is definitely in the process of becoming better. Sorry, I don't really play games.

YouTube tutorials and old forum pages are your friend... everything I have run into as an issue had already been encountered by some other poor soul. If you still cannot find a solution I think the Linux community is filled with people who want to see you succeed and will help you out. You are not an idiot, you can read and follow directions, I think it will be fine :]

LibreOffice, the default word document/spreadsheet/whatever office suite thing for Linux Mint, is entirely compatible with Microsoft Office, which means old documents you have in Microsoft can be accessed and edited with LibreOffice. This is great because I'm personally also not a huge fan of hoarding everything on Goggle Docs/Drive which is what I had been doing to cope with losing access to Microsoft Office.

The whole time I was gnashing my teeth trying to get it work I simply kept telling myself "how can I ever hope escape from capitalism if I can't even escape the grasp of Microsoft even with so many people waiting to pull me over to the other side" and well. It will probably take a while for you to iron out the kinks. Weeks, months maybe. I don't even know if it's worth it just yet. But I'm doing it because I feel like it's the right path for me to take. I can really only see Microsoft getting worse so I may as well pack my bags now rather than later, eh?

oh my God thank you so so much for this. I really do just need to stop one day and do good research about it bc I always get intimidated/too overwhelmed and stop. I might know a single person who seems like they would have used linux at some point so I'll see if I can talk to them. thank u so much

[sunnyrinusstudies]

Going FOSS: An Intro to Open-Source software for studyblr (and also some privacy related bits)

Source for Header Image

Intro & attempt at TLDR

Hey everyone! Today I’d like to tell y’all something about Open Source Software, and also Why this should matter to you! This’ll probably be the first post of a series I intend to do, because I believe the Studyblr community, even the non-nerd folks, could really benefit from switching some things out in their digital environment. Since this is a long post, I attempted to summarise it below, please do read on if you have the spoons tho!

TLDR?

FOSS stands for “Free and Open Source Software” the “free” part doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free as in free pizza, but mostly means free as in freedom.

There’s a humongous amount of variants on this concept, but the core of FOSS specifically is the four freedoms:

1. To run the program however you want and for whatever you want

2. To study how the program works and to change it in whatever way you want

3. To be able to share it with whomever you feel like

4. To be able to share your modified version with whomever you want

There’s a whole host of software licenses built around these concepts, you can check those out at the Open Source Initiative website, or at Choose A License. Both have a good summary of what they all stand for.

Open Source software is used for a lot of products, nearly every single webserver is an Apache Linux server, Google chrome is built on top of their open source chromium (google is still the devil, but y’know, it’s an example), and even deep deep down, Apple computers run on top of a Linux Kernel. Many more can be listed, but I won’t do that otherwise this isn’t a TLDR anymore.

Now, Why is this important for you? The Open Source Initiative summed it up real nicely already, but heres a short paraphrase:

Control & Security. If software is open source then you can check if it really works the way it does, and to make sure it’s not spying on you. Even if you don’t have the skills for it, someone else who does will be able to check. Also if you don’t like how something works in a program, then you’ll be able to change it or find someone else’s changed version that you like more.

Training. People who want to learn programming can use the code to see what makes programs tick, as well as use it as a guide for their own projects.

Stability. Because everything’s out in the open, that means someone else can take up maintaining a project or make a successor of it, in case the original developers suddenly quit working on it. This is especially important when it’s software that’s absolutely critical for certain tasks.

Community. It’s not just one program. It’s a lot of people working together to make, test, use, and promote a project they really love. Lots of projects end up with a dedicated fanbase that helps support the developers in continuing to work on the software.

I’d like to add one more tho: Privacy, which ties in a lot with the security part. Nowadays with protests going on and everything being online due to the pandemic, folks have been and will be confronted much more with the impact of privacy, and lack thereof. Open Source software means that if any company or group tries to spy on you, then you and anyone who feels like checking, will be able to know and take action on it. Here’s the EFF page on privacy and why it should matter to you

If that got your attention then read on past the readmore button! Or, if nothing else maybe check out the Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia? Or maybe the resources page of the Open Source Initiative?

Terminology: Let’s get that out of the way first

Open Source: The source code that a program is made up of is freely accessible, anyone can look at it and check whether it works well enough or to make sure it doesn’t spy on you.

FOSS: Free and Open Source Software. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to pay for it, it’s free as in freedom and free speech, not free pizza.

There are four freedoms associated with FOSS:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

FLOSS: Free and Libre Open Source Software. This time it is “free” as in free pizza. The “libre” is french for “free” as in freedom.

GRATIS: Sometimes people use this word to mean “free” as in free pizza. Usually alongside “FOSS”

Licenses : A license is something that tells others what they can or cannot do with your code. Licenses also apply to art and literature, those are copyright licenses. There are many different software licenses and I’m not going to be able to list them all.

The biggest players however are:

Apache License 2.0

The 3-Clause BSD License

GNU General Public License (also known as GPL)

MIT License

Mozilla Public License 2.0

There’s even more and you can find a list of them Here on the Open Source Initiative site There’s so many licenses that there’s even a Choose A License site, where you can pick a license depending on what you want it to achieve

Who and/or what even uses open source software?

You don’t need to be some nerd to benefit from Open Source software, in fact, you’re using open source software right now! The biggest example is the whole entire internet. Websites are stored on servers, and nearly every single webserver is a Linux server. The second biggest browser Firefox is open source, and even google chrome is built on top of “chromium” an open source base. If you dont use an iPhone, then you’re probably on an Android phone. Guess what? Android is part of the Android Open Source Project, which is then built upon a GNU/Linux base. All Open Source. Chromebooks? Built on top of a Linux kernel (like a non-patented engine you could put into any motor vehicle you’d like). Heck, even Apple computers are, at their core, built on top of a Linux kernel.

Neat apps you may wanna check out!

I’ve made a little list of apps that might be especially useful for studyblr folks, but depending on how well this post does I’ll probably make some more posts for specific apps.

TiddlyWiki, has a bajillion different ways to organise your thoughts, and also a lot of variant builds out there. Check out their table of contents if you feel lost! There’s versions available for most big browsers, as well as windows, linux, mac, android, and iOS.

AnyType, is an app that looks and almost exactly like notion, but is much more decentralised. They’re currently still in development but if you want to support them, sign up for early access and give them some feedback so they know what works and doesn’t! They’re still in closed alpha, but are intending to give beta access to about 100 folks at a time throughout 2021, so please sign up if this looks interesting to you!

Trilium Notes, is slightly more like a “notebook”, however you can arrange your notes in nearly infinitely deep folders. You can use things like Relation Maps & Link Maps to visualise your notes and how they go together. There’s even more they do and I just cant list it all, so go check out their stuff for a more comprehensive overview! Works on windows, linux, and (unsupported) mac

LibreOffice and ONLYOFFICE are two office suites that function just as well as micro$oft office, often Even Better in my experience. I’ve used LibreOffice for years now and honestly? never going back. OnlyOffice is technically free (as in pizza), but it’s a slight hassle to get everything set up, cause you need to set it up on a server. They have a paid and hosted version available with educational discounts, but honestly i’d go with LibreOffice.

OnePile, is an app I haven’t used myself since it only runs on Apple stuff. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about it so that’s why it’s in here. It looks like it works similar to most general “note taking notebook” apps. Looks really pretty too honestly.

EtherPad, is similar to ONLYOFFICE, however this one’s a lot more focused on specifically text documents. Works with real-time collaboration which is really neat.

Anything that FramaSoft has going on. They’re a non-profit organisation, dedicated to promoting digital freedom. A lot of open source cloud related things are not really useful to people who don’t have the time and/or money to set up a whole-ass server. That’s where FramaSoft comes in, they do it for you. Just about everything they offer (here’s a full overview) are free (as in free pizza). They also have a separate site to help you get started!

It’s not free to run it all on their side, so if you find yourself interested in using their services please try to support them any way you monetarily can! (they even have a “minetest” server (not minecraft, deeeefinitely not minecraft))

Joplin!! Which is also what I used to write this post so I wouldn’t have to use The Tumble’s post writing thing. It’s good for taking notes, has a bunch of neat plug-ins, and can also sync with a variety of cloud services!

Nextcloud For if you want to go just that little bit further on the open source and the privacy. Nextcloud has honestly way too many features for me to list, but the important parts are that it’s a nigh perfect replacement for office365, and probably even GSuite. The one caveat is that you either gotta host it yourself, or get someone else to host it for you. Framasoft (mentioned above), has a nextcloud instance. It works on just about every single platform, and can integrate with an absurd amount of services. Here’s a list of providers that work with nextcloud, and what different apps they have installed on their server.

I personally use Disroot, because they’re a local (as in, my country) non-profit that offer about 2gb of free storage, and then for about 15 cents per GB per month you can get more storage if you want. They also have an email service which is hella neat. Their one main rule is Do Not Use For Business Purposes, because they’re here to help the individual folks, not companies.

Neat Links you may also want to look at!

Here are some sources, and also resources that I used for this post. There’s also some stuff here that I think folks may be interested in in general.

General Wikipedia Article on Open Source Software

The Free and Open Source Software portal on Wikipedia

Resources page of the Open Source Initiative

Free Software Foundation definition of “free software”

itsfoss page on what FOSS means

itsfoss page on the history of FOSS

Open Source Software Foundation list of projects and apps they really like

Open Source Initiative on “the open source way”, and how it goes beyond software

Check out literally anything the Electronic Frontier Foundation has going on maybe?

TED talk on privacy and why it’s important

The Surveillance Self Defense project by the EFF

This EFF page on privacy for students

ExpressVPN article on privacy (not necessarily endorsing this company, just a good article)

What’s next?

I’ll probably make some more posts on specific kinds of software that I think folks may like. Or maybe a general overview on the more privacy forcused reasons and solutions for doing all of this.

Future post ideas, none of these are set in stone:

Open source Note taking apps

Replacements for just about Every Single google service I can think of

My personal setup

Open source / privacy conscious social media that studyblr folks may be into

Chatting, Calling, Videocalling: Discord and whatsapp alternatives etc

??? More studyblr apps that could do with a FOSS alternative??

How to support open source when you’re not a big fudgin nerd

How to be better at digital privacy and security, while still maintaining that studyblr aesthetic

Apps, software, other stuff, for specific areas of study maybe?

Feel free to suggest other ideas! Or leave feedback! This is my first big resource post so I wanna know if/how I can do better when I make another one!

[paintpencilink]

But wait, there's more!!!

Firefox Focus

An entire version of the Firefox browser that you can get as an app. It's basically private browsing but better. It dumps your session's internet history and cookies and stuff every time you close the app, and it does a lot to keep you from being tracked.

I'm a writer and when I need to search weird shit like "how to detect police gps trackers on your car," I use Firefox Focus.

I also use...

DuckDuckGo

There's a search engine called DuckDuckGo that doesn't collect your data at all either.

There's a few ads to keep it running, but they're targeted based on the search you're doing at the time and not based on trackers that follow you around the whole ass internet

DDG has no frickin clue who you are and that's how they like it, and that's how you should like it too.

the only time you'll notice duckduckgo being worse than google is for local maps and stuff because it uses yahoo maps integration or smth. But let's be real, you already have the google maps app on your phone anyway, so just use that for this one thing.

...and if you're an overachiever, upgrade to Linux Mint while you're at it.

Linux Mint

Use this instead of (or alongside) Windows. Yes, you can have both on one computer.

it's easy to use, I have both my parents using Linux

it doesn't force updates

its updates don't break your computer when you do install them

it doesn't artificially slow down your machine on purpose to try to get you to update

(or to convince you that the updates are making your computer faster, when it's windows' fault everything is slow in the first place)

I installed it on my mom's laptop alongside windows, and she gets mad if she ever has to boot into her windows partition instead because it's so much slower

the cinnamon desktop interface is really clean and pretty

no frickin ads in your start menu

no frickin microsoft spying on you all the damn time

notes on the software thing with Linux

the only big problem you will run into is with certain software being only available for mac or windows; this can be fixed with virtual machines or by using a dual boot setup, both of which sound more complicated than they are

some people also use WINE (windows emulator) but I don’t have that much experience with it personally

because actually a lot of the software you're used to has BETTER open source alternatives

libreoffice > microsoft office, inkscape > adobe illustrator, krita and/or gimp > photoshop, and all of them are faster, usually easier to use, and FREE

a surprising number of steam games and other software now run on linux mint, ubuntu, and debian--pick one of those 3 you'll be fine

your games will probably run better too because linux is more efficient with the hardware in general

seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so it’s not totally dominating the market yet but it’s worrying that we’re basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.

[autolenaphilia]

My super-causal reviews of some lightweight linux distros

I recently dug out an old laptop that ran windows 8.1 and installed linux on it. Since it's not my main computer anymore, i decided to distro hop a bit on it. The computer is roughly a decade old and has only 2 gb of ram, so lightweight distros it is. What I mean by lightweight is that they put little strain on the underlying hardware in terms of for example RAM or CPU useage. Of course, Linux distros in general have much lower system requirements than Windows ever-growing requirements and size, but there are still significant variations in system requirements. So lightweight distros are light by Linux distro standards. Here are reviews of four I've tried out.

Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I'm going to lump them together because they are both variations on Ubuntu, just with different desktop environments. Vanilla Ubuntu uses Gnome, while Lubuntu uses LXQT and Xubuntu uses XFCE, which are both lighter desktop environments. Xubuntu I think is more friendly to older hardware, while Lubuntu abandoned that goal some years back and nowadays don't even have official minimum system requirements. So Xubuntu is probably better as a light-weight version of Ubuntu, although they are both kinda heavy. And well they're both Ubuntu, and carries a lot of that distro's advantages and disadvantages. Ubuntu due to its focus on user-friendliness is easy to run, and you can get help easily online if something goes wrong due to its large userbase. On the other hand, the developers of Ubuntu, Canonical have gotten a fixation on their own "Snap" file format. And It's just a worse version of flatpaks. They're fine when they run, but take ages to start up, which is annoying. Despite their names, they are not snappy. Overall I prefer Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, but which uses the superior flatpak file format by default instead.

Linux Lite: I dislike this distro. I have reblogged a post that recommended it, and there is one big problem with it: It's default web browser is Google Chrome. That could be forgiveable if I could just go into the distro's software manager and install firefox and uninstall Chrome. But chrome is uninstallable from the software manager and firefox is only avaialble as a snap without command line tinkering. Hard pass, I want to easily get rid of Chrome, Google's proprietary monopolistic mess and snap package firefox is just as annoying here as it is in ubuntu. Linux Mint has an xfce version, the same environment xubuntu and Lite uses, and I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect it's superioror to both of them just because of the lack of Snap bullshit.

AntiX Now this distro really impressed me. It's built to run on anything. "256MB RAM is the recommended minimum for antiX." which is insanely low in 2023. it's one of the few distros to still support 32bit versions. It doesn't even have a desktop environment by default, instead it uses window managers to create a GUI. I was shocked to discover you could install desktop environments from the package manager. And despite everything, it works perfectly fine. It's not super challenging to use, the installation works fine. There are sane default programs like libreoffice and firefox, and a decent selection in the package manager. The window manager desktop is easy to use and very responsive. It was very fast and responsive even when running from an usb stick. Impressive distro to remain perfecatly useable even when it's so light. I will stick to Mint as my daily driver, but if you have an old computer with a low amount of ram, use Antix.

[traegorn]

I vague posted because I didn't want it to seem like a callout, and I didn't feel like getting into a random argument with a stranger I don't follow. Like, it was the post right after my reblog. It's that normal Tumblr thing where you make a post right after your reblog to express the rest of your feelings on a topic without linking it to the original post.

This is a normal, non-hostile thing to do. Because if that post circulates, literally no one will connect it to the original subject. And it doesn't drag shit up that's already settled.

Also - I deliberately didn't respond to your follow up two days ago (that - again - you made after this post) because based on your response I felt like we were just going to get into a semantic argument about what constituted an "abandoned" project that "hasn't been updated." It seemed needlessly nitpicky, I could see where you were coming from, and I had other stuff to do.

So I let you have the last word there. And I thought we were done.

But you're here. Again. In my notes. Having hunted down a post I made prior to your response to me. Digging up an argument I'd literally dropped. Like I know I don't post a lot over the weekends, but you still had to go looking for this post.

So now we're here.

I guess apparently now we get to have the conversation where I disagree with you over the definition of a fucking word.

What we consider an abandoned project and what we don't is complicated. For spectators watching - the original OOo is fully abandoned, and both AOO and LibreOffice are forks of the original project. While it's true that AOO has lost most community support in favor of LibreOffice (and AOO lost almost all of its funding almost a decade ago), there are developers contributing to AOO (even if you could probably count them on one hand). Have I gone through the code myself? No. I'll admit that. But to describe a piece of software that literally just put out a release as fully abandoned seems inaccurate to me. Is it severely under supported for what a project like that needs? Yes. Does that constitute the project being "abandoned?" I personally don't think so.

As long as one person is plugging away, someone's keeping the lights on.

Is LibreOffice better and are you right in recommending it over AOO? Absolutely. And it is what I'd recommend people use too. It has much better support for Microsoft's current file formats, and it's what I have installed on my Macs and Linux machines.

That's it. That's where we disagree. That's what you've decided to dig up.

Also, and I want this to be clear, your choosing to respond to this post after you already got the last word on your post is fuckin' wild my dude. Like you deliberately went out of your way to re-start a fight you had publicly already won.

Great job.

I hate it when people write authoritative posts on this site without checking to make sure they're right first.

And then a big account reblogs it.

And now dumb misinformation is everywhere.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to protect the future web from its founders' own frailty #1yrago

Earlier this month, I gave the afternoon keynote at the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web Summit, and my talk was about how the people who founded the web with the idea of having an open, decentralized system ended up building a system that is increasingly monopolized by a few companies -- and how we can prevent the same things from happening next time.

The speech was very well received -- it got a standing ovation -- and has attracted a lot of discussion since.

Jonke Suhr has done me the service of transcribing the talk, which will facilitate translating it into other languages as well as making it accessible to people who struggle with video. Many thanks, Jonke!

This is also available as an MP3 and a downloadable video.

I've included an edited version below:

So, as you might imagine, I'm here to talk to you about dieting advice. If you ever want to go on a diet, the first thing you should really do is throw away all your Oreos.

It's not that you don't want to lose weight when you raid your Oreo stash in the middle of the night. It's just that the net present value of tomorrow's weight loss is hyperbolically discounted in favor of the carbohydrate rush of tonight's Oreos. If you're serious about not eating a bag of Oreos your best bet is to not have a bag of Oreos to eat. Not because you're weak willed. Because you're a grown up. And once you become a grown up, you start to understand that there will be tired and desperate moments in your future and the most strong-willed thing you can do is use the willpower that you have now when you're strong, at your best moment, to be the best that you can be later when you're at your weakest moment.

And this has a name: It's called a Ulysses pact. Ulysses was going into Siren-infested waters. When you go into Siren-infested waters, you put wax in your ears so that you can't hear what the Sirens are singing, because otherwise you'll jump into the sea and drown. But Ulysses wanted to hear the Sirens. And so he came up with a compromise: He had his sailors tie him to the mast, so that when he heard the call of the Sirens, even though he would beg and gibber and ask them to untie him, so that he could jump into the sea, he would be bound to the mast and he would be able to sail through the infested waters.

This is a thing that economists talk about all the time, it's a really critical part of how you build things that work well and fail well. Now, building a Web that is decentralized is a hard thing to do, and the reason that the web ceases to be decentralized periodically is because it's very tempting to centralize things. There are lots of short term gains to be had from centralizing things and you want to be the best version of yourself, you want to protect your present best from your future worst.

The reason that the Web is closed today is that people just like you, the kind of people who went to Doug Engelbart's demo in 1968, the kind of people who went to the first Hackers conference, people just like you, made compromises, that seemed like the right compromise to make at the time. And then they made another compromise. Little compromises, one after another.

And as humans, our sensory apparatus is really only capable of distinguishing relative differences, not absolute ones. And so when you make a little compromise, the next compromise that you make, you don't compare it to the way you were when you were fresh and idealistic. You compare it to your current, "stained" state. And a little bit more stained hardly makes any difference. One compromise after another, and before you know it, you're suing to make APIs copyrightable or you’re signing your name to a patent on one-click purchasing or you're filing the headers off of a GPL library and hope no one looks too hard at your binaries. Or you're putting a backdoor in your code for the NSA.

And the thing is: I am not better than the people who made those compromises. And you are not better than the people who made those compromises. The people who made those compromises discounted the future costs of the present benefits of some course of action, because it's easy to understand present benefits and it's hard to remember future costs.

You're not weak if you eat a bag of Oreos in the middle of the night. You're not weak if you save all of your friends' mortgages by making a compromise when your business runs out of runway. You're just human, and you're experiencing that hyperbolic discounting of future costs because of that immediate reward in the here and now. If you want to make sure that you don't eat a bag of Oreos in the middle of the night, make it more expensive to eat Oreos. Make it so that you have to get dressed and find your keys and figure out where the all-night grocery store is and drive there and buy a bag of Oreos. And that's how you help yourself in the future, in that moment where you know what's coming down the road.

The answer to not getting pressure from your bosses, your stakeholders, your investors or your members, to do the wrong thing later, when times are hard, is to take options off the table right now. This is a time-honored tradition in all kinds of economic realms. Union negotiators, before they go into a tough negotiation, will say: "I will resign as your negotiator, before I give up your pension." And then they sit down across the table from the other side, and the other side says "It's pensions or nothing". And the union leaders say: "I hear what you're saying. I am not empowered to trade away the pensions. I have to quit. They have to go elect a new negotiator, because I was elected contingent on not bargaining away the pensions. The pensions are off the table."

Brewster has talked about this in the context of code, he suggested that we could build distributed technologies using the kinds of JavaScript libraries that are found in things like Google Docs and Google Mail, because no matter how much pressure is put on browser vendors, or on technology companies in general, the likelihood that they will disable Google Docs or Google Mail is very, very low. And so we can take Google Docs hostage and use it as an inhuman shield for our own projects.

The GPL does this. Once you write code, with the GPL it's locked open, it's irrevocably licensed for openness and no one can shut it down in the future by adding restrictive terms to the license. The reason the GPL works so well, the reason it became such a force for locking things open, is that it became indispensable. Companies that wanted to charge admission for commodity components like operating systems or file editors or compilers found themselves confronted with the reality that there's a huge difference between even a small price and no price at all, or no monetary price. Eventually it just became absurd to think that you would instantiate a hundred million virtual machines for an eleventh of a second and get a license and a royalty for each one of them.

And at that point, GPL code became the only code that people used in cloud applications in any great volume, unless they actually were the company that published the operating system that wasn't GPL'd. Communities coalesced around the idea of making free and open alternatives to these components: GNU/Linux, Open- and LibreOffice, git, and those projects benefited from a whole bunch of different motives, not always the purest ones. Sometimes it was programmers who really believed ethically in the project and funded their own work, sometimes talent was tight and companies wanted to attract programmers, and the way that they got them to come through the door is by saying: "We'll give you some of your time to work on an ethical project and contribute code to it."

Sometimes companies got tactical benefits by zeroing out the margins on their biggest competitor's major revenue stream. So if you want to fight with Microsoft, just make Office free. And sometimes companies wanted to use but not sell commodity components. Maybe you want to run a cloud service but you don't want to be in the operating system business, so you put a bunch of programmers on making Linux better for your business, without ever caring about getting money from the operating system. Instead you get it from the people who hire you to run their cloud.

Everyone of those entities, regardless of how they got into this situation of contributing to open projects, eventually faced hard times, because hard times are a fact of life. And systems that work well, but fail badly, are doomed to die in flames. The GPL is designed to fail well. It makes it impossible to hyperbolically discount the future costs of doing the wrong thing to gain an immediate benefit. When your investor or your acquisition suitor or your boss say "Screw your ethics, hippie, we need to make payroll", you can just pull out the GPL and say: "Do you have any idea how badly we will be destroyed if we violate copyright law by violating the GPL?"

It's why Microsoft was right to be freaked out about the GPL during the Free and Open Source wars. Microsoft's coders were nerds like us, they fell in love with computers first, and became Microsoft employees second. They had benefited from freedom and openness, they had cated out BASIC programs, they had viewed sources, and they had an instinct towards openness. Combining that with the expedience of being able to use FLOSS, like not having to call a lawyer before you could be an engineer, and with the rational calculus, that if they made FLOSS, that when they eventually left Microsoft they could keep using the code that they had made there, meant that Microsoft coders and Microsoft were working for different goals. And the way they expressed that was in how they used and licensed their code.

This works so well that for a long time, nobody even knew if the GPL was enforceable, because nobody wanted to take the risk of suing and setting a bad precedent. It took years and years for us to find out in which jurisdictions we could enforce the GPL.

That brings me to another kind of computer regulation, something that has been bubbling along under the surface for a long time, at least since the Open Source wars, and that's the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Digital Restrictions Management, as some people call it. This is the technology that tries to control how you use your computer. The idea is that you have software on the computer that the user can't override. If there is remote policy set on that computer that the user objects to, the computer rejects the user's instruction in favor of the remote policy. It doesn't work very well. It's very hard to stop people who are sitting in front of a computer from figuring out how it works and changing how it works. We don't keep safes in bank robbers' living rooms, not even really good ones.

But we have a law that protects it, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it's been around since 1998 and it has lots of global equivalents like section 6 of the EUCD in Europe, implemented all across the EU member states. In New Zealand they tried to pass a version of the DMCA and there were uprisings and protests in the streets, they actually had to take the law off the books because it was so unpopular. And then the Christchurch earthquake hit and a member of parliament reintroduced it as a rider to the emergency relief bill to dig people out of the rubble. In Canada it's Bill C-11 from 2011. And what it does is, it makes it a felony to tamper with those locks, a felony punishable by 500,000 dollars fine and five years in jail for a first offense. It makes it a felony to do security auditing of those locks and publish information about the flaws that are present in them or their systems.

This started off as a way to make sure that people who bought DVDs in India didn't ship them to America. But it is a bad idea whose time has come. It has metastasized into every corner of our world. Because if you put just enough DRM around a product that you can invoke the law, then you can use other code, sitting behind the DRM, to control how the user uses that product, to extract more money. GM uses it to make sure that you can't get diagnostics out of the car without getting a tool that they license to you, and that license comes with a term that says you have to buy parts from GM, and so all repair shops for GM that can access your diagnostic information have to buy their parts from GM and pay monopoly rents.

We see it in insulin pumps, we see it in thermostats and we see it in the "Internet of Things rectal thermometer", which debuted at CES this year, which means we now have DRM restricted works in our asses. And it's come to the web. It's been lurking in the corners of the web for a long time. But now it's being standardized at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to something called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The idea of EME is that there is conduct that users want to engage in that no legislature in the world has banned, like PVR'ing their Netflix videos. But there are companies that would prefer that conduct not to be allowed. By wrapping the video with just enough DRM to invoke the DMCA, you can convert your commercial preference to not have PVRs (which are no more and no less legal than the VCR was when in 1984 the Supreme Court said you can record video off your TV) into something with the force of law, whose enforcement you can outsource to national governments.

What that means, is that if you want to do interoperability without permission, if you want to do adversarial interoperability, if you want to add a feature that the manufacturer or the value chain doesn't want, if you want to encapsulate Gopher inside of the Web to launch a web browser with content form the first day, if you want to add an abstraction layer that lets you interoperate between two different video products so that you can shop between them and find out which one has the better deal, that conduct, which has never been banned by a legislature, becomes radioactively illegal.

It also means, that if you want to implement something that users can modify, you will find yourself at the sharp end of the law, because user modifiability for the core components of the system is antithetical to its goals of controlling user conduct. If there's a bit you can toggle that says "Turn DRM off now", then if you turn that bit off, the entire system ceases to work. But the worst part of all is that it makes browsers into no-go zones for security disclosures about vulnerabilities in the browser, because if you know about a vulnerability you could use it to weaken EME. But you could also use it to attack the user in other ways.

Adding DRM to browsers, standardizing DRM as an open standards organization, that's a compromise. It's a little compromise, because after all there's already DRM in the world, and it's a compromise that's rational if you believe that DRM is inevitable. If you think that the choice is between DRM that's fragmented or DRM that we get a say in, that we get to nudge into a better position, then it's the right decision to make. You get to stick around and do something to make it less screwed up later, as opposed to being self-marginalized by refusing to participate at all.

But if DRM is inevitable, and I refuse to believe that it is, it's because individually, all across the world, people who started out with the best of intentions made a million tiny compromises that took us to the point where DRM became inevitable, where the computers that are woven into our lives, with increasing intimacy and urgency, are designed to control us instead of being controlled by us. And the reasons those compromises were made is because each one of us thought that we were alone and that no one would have our back, that if we refuse to make the compromise, the next person down the road would, and that eventually, this would end up being implemented, so why not be the one who makes the compromise now.

They were good people, those who made those compromises. They were people who were no worse than you and probably better than me. They were acting unselfishly. They were trying to preserve the jobs and livelihoods and projects of people that they cared about. People who believed that others would not back their play, that doing the right thing would be self-limiting. When we're alone, and when we believe we're alone, we're weak.

It's not unusual to abuse standards bodies to attain some commercial goal. The normal practice is to get standards bodies to incorporate your patents into a standard, to ensure that if someone implements your standard, you get a nickel every time it ships. And that's a great way to make rent off of something that becomes very popular. But the W3C was not armtwisted about adding patents back into standards. That's because the W3C has the very best patents policy of any standards body in the world. When you come to the W3C to make a standard for the web, you promise not to use your patents against people who implement that standard. And the W3C was able to make that policy at a moment in which it was ascendant, in which people were clamoring to join it, in which it was the first moments of the Web and in which they were fresh.

The night they went on a diet, they were able to throw away all the Oreos in the house. They were where you are now, starting a project that people around the world were getting excited about, that was showing up on the front page of the New York Times. Now that policy has become the ironclad signifier of the W3C. What's the W3C? It's the open standards body that's so open, that you don't get to assert patents if you join it. And it remains intact.

How will we keep the DMCA from colonizing the Locked Open Web? How will we keep DRM from affecting all of us? By promising to have each others' backs. By promising that by participating in the Open Web, we take the DMCA off the table. We take silencing security researchers, we take blocking new entrances to the market off the table now, when we are fresh, when we are insurgent, before we have turned from the pirates that we started out as into the admirals that some of us will become. We take that option off the table.

The EFF has proposed a version of this at the W3C and at other bodies, where we say: To be a member, you have to promise not to use the DMCA to aggress against those, who report security vulnerabilities in W3C standards, and people who make interoperable implementations of W3C standards. We've also proposed that to the FDA, as a condition of getting approval for medical implants, we've asked them to make companies promise in a binding way never to use the DMCA to aggress against security researchers. We've taken it to the FCC, and we're taking it elsewhere. If you want to sign an open letter to the W3C endorsing this, email me: cory@eff.org

But we can go further than that, because Ulysses pacts are fantastically useful tools for locking stuff open. It's not just the paper that you sign when you start your job, that takes a little bit of money out of your bank account every month for your 401k, although that works, too. The U.S. constitution is a Ulysses pact. It understands that lawmakers will be corrupted and it establishes a principal basis for repealing the laws that are inconsistent with the founding principles as well as a process for revising those principles as need be.

A society of laws is a lot harder to make work than a society of code or a society of people. If all you need to do is find someone who's smart and kind and ask them to make all your decisions for you, you will spend a lot less time in meetings and a lot more time writing code. You won't have to wrangle and flame or talk to lawyers. But it fails badly. We are all of us a mix of short-sighted and long-term, depending on the moment, our optimism, our urgency, our blood-sugar levels...

We must give each other moral support. Literal moral support, to uphold the morals of the Decentralized Web, by agreeing now what an open internet is and locking it open. When we do that, if we create binding agreements to take certain kinds of conduct off the table for anything that interoperates with or is part of what we're building today, then our wise leaders tomorrow will never be pressurized to make those compromises, because if the compromise can't be made, there is no point in leaning on them to make it.

We must set agreements and principles that allow us to resist the song of the Sirens in the future moments of desperation. And I want to propose two key principles, as foundational as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or the First Amendment:

1) When a computer receives conflicting instructions from its owner and from a remote party, the owner always wins.

Systems should always be designed so that their owners can override remote instructions and should never be designed so that remote instructions can be executed if the owner objects to them. Once you create the capacity for remote parties to override the owners of computers, you set the stage for terrible things to come. Any time there is a power imbalance, expect the landlord, the teacher, the parent of the queer kid to enforce that power imbalance to allow them to remotely control the device that the person they have power over uses.

You will create security risks, because as soon as you have a mechanism that hides from the user, to run code on the user's computers, anyone who hijacks that mechanism, either by presenting a secret warrant or by breaking into a vulnerability in the system, will be running in a privileged mode that is designed not to be interdicted by the user.

If you want to make sure that people show up at the door of the Distributed Web asking for backdoors, to the end of time, just build in an update mechanism that the user can't stop. If you want to stop those backdoor requests from coming in, build in binary transparency, so that any time an update ships to one user that's materially different from the other ones, everybody gets notified and your business never sells another product. Your board of directors will never pressurize you to go along with the NSA or the Chinese secret police to add a backdoor, if doing so will immediately shut down your business.

Throw away the Oreos now.

Let's also talk about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This is the act that says if you exceed your authorization on someone else's computer, where that authorization can be defined as simply the terms of service that you click through on your way into using a common service, you commit a felony and can go to jail. Let's throw that away, because it's being used routinely to shut down people who discover security vulnerabilities in systems.

2) Disclosing true facts about the security of systems that we rely upon should never, ever be illegal.

We can have normative ways and persuasive ways of stopping people from disclosing recklessly, we can pay them bug bounties, we can have codes of conduct. But we must never, ever give corporations or the state the legal power to silence people who know true things about the systems we entrust our lives, safety, and privacy to.

These are the foundational principles. Computers obey their owners, true facts about risks to users are always legal to talk about. And I charge you to be hardliners on these principles, to be called fanatics. If they are not calling you puritans for these principles you are not pushing hard enough. If you computerize the world, and you don't safeguard the users of computers form coercive control, history will not remember you as the heroes of progress, but as the blind handmaidens of future tyranny.

This internet, this distributed internet that we are building, the Redecentralization of the Internet, if it ever succeeds, will someday fail, because everything fails, because overwhelmingly, things are impermanent. What it gives rise to next, is a function of what we make today. There's a parable about this:

The state of Roman metallurgy in the era of chariots, determined the wheel base of a Roman chariot, which determined the width of the Roman road, which determined the width of the contemporary road, because they were built atop the ruins of the Roman roads, which determined the wheel base of cars, which determined the widest size that you could have for a container that can move from a ship, to a truck, to a train, which determined the size of a train car, which determined the maximum size of the Space Shuttle's disposable rockets.

Roman metallurgy prefigured the size of the Space Shuttle's rockets.

This is not entirely true, there are historians who will explain the glosses in which it's not true. But it is a parable about what happens when empires fall. Empires always fall. If you build a glorious empire, a good empire, an empire we can all be proud to live in, it will someday fall. You cannot lock it open forever. The best you can hope for is to wedge it open until it falls, and to leave behind the materials, the infrastructure that the people who reboot the civilization that comes after ours will use to make a better world.

A legacy of technology, norms and skills that embrace fairness, freedom, openness and transparency, is a commitment to care about your shared destiny with every person alive today and all the people who will live in the future.

Cory Doctorow: "How Stupid Laws and Benevolent Dictators can Ruin the Decentralized Web, too" [Transcript by Jonke Suhr]

https://boingboing.net/2016/06/24/how-to-protect-the-future-web.html

[yashasvisharma-blog]

Why you should change from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (and why you shouldn’t)libreOffice’s 5.1 refresh included help for Windows 10.

An informal adaptation of LibreOffice was as of late transferred to the Microsoft Store, however at this point doesn’t office.com/setup  appear whenever looked straightforwardly in the store. It’s as yet accessible by means of LibreOffice’s site, however.

While the adaptation of LibreOffice that was accessible through the Microsoft Store isn’t legitimate, it’s a quality programming suite that makes one wonder,Is it worth changing from Microsoft Office?

I’ve utilized Microsoft Office since Windows 95. Be that as it may, I chose to investigate LibreOffice after it landed in the Microsoft Store. It’s inspired me, however it’s suitability as an office suite depends to a great extent on your setup.

Here are a few reasons why you ought to pick LibreOffice over Microsoft Office, and a few reasons why you shouldn’t. LibreOffice is accessible for nothing on Windows 10, Mac, and Linux through Libre Office’s site.

See Office 365 at Microsoft Download LibreOffice

Motivation to switch: Value

The primary thing that grabs the attention about LibreOffice is the sticker price, or all the more explicitly the absence of one. LibreOffice initially forked off of OpenOffice and has been consistently kept up and created throughout the years. It’s a standout amongst the best free office suites of uses around and has programs for word handling, spreadsheets,introductions, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It is a adaptable and incredible arrangement of projects, however it’s important that it imitates the more established center arrangement of applications from Microsoft Office and doesn’t have counterparts to more current projects like OneNote.

While there are many word processors and shoddy or free projects that endeavor to convey a full office setup, Libre Office is one of the most far reaching. Its wide scope of applications handles most by far of office-related work processes. What’s more, it does all of this for nothing.

It bolsters open configurations that enable you to utilize archives from different projects so you don’t need to detach yourself or your work process into a Libre Office world.

The estimation of LibreOffice is really great. It’s basically an ad for the open source network in light of how extraordinary of an application you can lawfully get for nothing.

Motivation to switch: Dedicated engineers

While LibreOffice is free, it’s not some indifferent task. It’s routinely kept up and refreshed to help the most recent adaptations of Windows 10. The suite can likewise be extended with expansions to include more power and flexibility.

While that probably won’t appear to be a major ordeal, some applications that are worked to recreate or straightforwardly rival enormous names fall away also, progress toward becoming abandonware. LibreOffice discharged updates over the most recent couple of months to the two its “Still” and “New” branches. Since of this, you don’t have to stress over LibreOffice falling without end. All markers demonstrate that it is perfectly healthy and won’t go anyplace at any point in the near future. Regardless of whether it did, you wouldn’t need to stress in light of the fact that your archives would be in open configurations.

Reasons NOT to switch: Cloud restrictions

One of the greatest territories these two suites veer is by they way they approach on the web and cross-stage work processes.

Microsoft puts intensely in the cloud to give you a chance to open and spare reports anyplace you’d like. It likewise centers around having applications on a assortment of equipment, extending from PCs to tablets and telephones. LibreOffice is accessible on Windows, macOS, and Linux, yet iOS and Android are constrained to survey documents just except if you turn on trial highlights.

On the off chance that you have to spare something on one gadget and bounce to another and keep altering, you’ll be ideally serviced by Microsoft Office. You can do web based altering with things, for example, Collabora and ownCloud, however that is more muddled to set up than just marking into your Microsoft account. Microsoft Office additionally handles joint effort from numerous editors superior to LibreOffice.

Much like whatever remains of this correlation, how much this influences you will change. I utilize an individual PC, work MacBook, work iPad, and individual Android telephone. I use Office Online regularly and utilize two diverse OneDrive records for work and individual use. Along these lines, for me, these highlights are fundamental, and I would never change far from Microsoft Office. In any case, you could have a totally distinctive work process that would be extraordinary for you fixated on utilizing LibreOffice on select gadgets and sparing them onto a cloud like Dropbox.

So would it be a good idea for you to change from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice?

Choosing to change to LibreOffice over Microsoft Office is to a great extent subject to your particular work process. While LibreOffice clearly is a superior esteem since you’re getting something for nothing, that isn’t a factor to somebody already’s identity cheerful to pay for Office 365 for things like OneDrive stockpiling or somebody that gets Office 365 through their work environment or school.

Contrasting the capabilities of the two suites is increasingly convoluted. It isn’t as basic as saying that one is better. On the off chance that you look through this page contrasting the capabilities you’ll see that the suites substitute as far as which is better from area to segment. For instance, LibreOffice gives you a chance to embed more things, for example, vector designs and FLAC sound, however Microsoft Office has better touch backing and better cross-stage coordinated effort highlights. My recommendation as far as highlights it to peruse through every suite and see which accommodates your own needs best.

LibreOffice is great, and in light of the fact that it’s free you can give it a shot while as yet paying for Microsoft Office. My recommendation is that in case you’re, out it an attempt while keeping your Office 365 membership and afterward settle on an increasingly perpetual choice.

At last, LibreOffice could spare you some critical money.

[techspotguruji]

Cinnamon Mint for Debian Just as Tasty

The official release of version 3 of Linux Mint Debian Edition hit the download servers at summer's end, offering a subtle alternative to the distro's Ubuntu-based counterpart. Codenamed "Cindy," the new version of LMDE is based on Debian 9 Stretch and features the Cinnamon desktop environment. Its release creates an unusual situation in the world of Linux distro competition. Linux Mint developers seem to be in competition with themselves. LMDE is an experimental release. The Linux Mint community offers its flagship distro based on Ubuntu Linux in three desktop versions: Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce. The Debian version is different under the hood. For example, the software package base is provided by Debian repositories instead of from Ubuntu repositories. Another difference is the lack of point releases in LMDE. The only application updates between each annual major upgrade are bug and security fixes. In other words, Debian base packages will stay the same in LMDE 3 until LMDE 4 is released next year. That is a significant difference. Mint system and desktop components get updated continuously in a semi-rolling release process as opposed to periodic point releases. So newly developed features are pushed directly into LMDE. Those same changes are held for inclusion on the next upcoming Linux Mint (Ubuntu-based) point release. Using LMDE instead of the regular Linux Mint distro is more cutting edge -- but only if you use the Cinnamon desktop. LMDE does not offer versions with Mate and Xfce desktops.

Personal Quest

Linux Mint -- as in the well-established Ubuntu-based release -- is my primary computing workhorse, mostly thanks to the continuing refinements in the Cinnamon desktop. However, I spend a portion of my weekly computing time using a variety of other Linux distros on a collection of "test bench" desktops and laptops dedicated to my regular Linux distro reviews. The most critical part of my regular distro hopping is constantly adjusting to the peculiar antics of a host of user interfaces, including GNOME, Mate, KDE Plasma and Xfce. I return to some favorites more than others depending on a distro's usability. That, of course, is a function of my own preferences and computing style. So when LMDE 3 became available, I gave in to finding the answer to a question I had avoided since the creation of Linux Mint Debian Edition several years ago. I already knew the issues separating Debian from Ubuntu. The dilemma: Does Debian-based versus Ubuntu-based Linux Mint really matter?   Linux Mint Debian is a near-identical replication of the Ubuntu-based Standard Linux Mint Cinnamon version.

Confusing Scenario

Does a Debian family tree make Linux Mint's Cinnamon distro better than the Ubuntu-based main version? Given the three desktop options in the Linux Mint distro, does a duplicate Cinnamon desktop choice involving a Debian base instead of an Ubuntu base make more sense? Consider this: Ubuntu Linux is based on Debian Linux. The Linux Mint distro is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. So why does Linux Mint creator and lead developer Clement Lefebvre care about developing a Debian strain of Linux Mint Cinnamon anyway? The Debian distro also offers a Cinnamon desktop option, but no plans exist for other desktop varieties.

Clarifying Clarity

I have found in years of writing software reviews that two factors are critical to how I respond to a particular Linux distribution. One is the underlying infrastructure or base a particular distro uses. A world of differences can exist when comparing an Arch-based distro to a Debian- or RPM- or Slackware-based distro, for instance -- and yes, there are numerous more family categories of Linux distributions. My second critical factor is the degree of tweaking a developer applies to the chosen desktop environment. That also involves considering the impact of whether the distro is lightweight for speed and simplicity or heavyweight for productivity and better performance. Some desktop options are little more than window managers like Openbox or Joe's Window Manager (JWN), IceWM or Fluxbox. Others are shell environments patched over GNOME 3 like Mate and Cinnamon. Assessing performance gets more involved when a distro offers more than one desktop option. Or when a distro uses a more modern or experimental desktop environment like Enlightenment, Pantheon, LXQt or Budgie.

Reasonable Need

What if the Ubuntu base went away? The Ubuntu community is headed by a commercial parent company, Canonical. The road to Linux development is littered with used-to-be Linux distros left abandoned. Their users had to move on. When the Ubuntu community years ago made its new Unity desktop the default, Lefebvre created Linux Mint as an alternative and replaced Unity with the infant Cinnamon he helped create. Ironically, the Ubuntu community recently jettisoned Unity and replaced it with the GNOME desktop. In Lefebvre's release notes for LMDE 3, he noted the development team's main goal was to see how viable the Linux Mint distribution would be and how much work would be necessary if Ubuntu ever should disappear.

Same Difference Maybe

The challenge is to make LMDE as similar as possible to Linux Mint without using Ubuntu. I am not a programmer, but it seems to me that what Lefebvre has been doing is make square pegs fit into round holes. It seems to be working. Debian, Linux Mint and Ubuntu all hail from the Debian repositories. Ubuntu also is derived from Debian. However, the base editions are different. The main difference between editions, Lefebvre explained, is that the standard edition may have a desktop application for some features. To get the same features in LMDE, users might have to compensate by altering a configuration file using a text editor. So far, that makes LMDE less polished than the standard (Ubuntu-based) edition, just as Debian tends to be less polished on the first bootup than Ubuntu, he suggested. His point is well taken. Linux Mint modifies the base integration to create a better user experience. That is why years ago, as an Ubuntu user, I crossed over to Linux Mint. It also bolsters what I previously said about my two essential factors in reviewing Linux distros. From Lefebvre's view, LMDE likely is a smarter choice over the Ubuntu-based version for users who prioritize stability and security. Users looking for more recent packages likely will be less satisfied with LMDE 3. Despite the more rigorous updates, some packages on LMDE could be several years old by the time the next release comes out. Some software package delays and other minor differences lie under the surface of the Debian edition of Linux Mint, but you will look long and hard to find them.

First Impressions

"Cindy" installed and ran without issue. Its iteration of the Cinnamon desktop displayed and performed like its near-twin from the Ubuntu family. That was a pleasant surprise that reinforced my longstanding reliance on the Cinnamon desktop over other options. To say that the Cindy release *just works* is an understatement. The menus and configuration settings are the same. The panel bar is an exact replica in terms of its appearance and functionality. The hot corners work the same way in both versions. So do the applets and desklets that I have grown so fond of over the years. Even the Software Center remains the same. Of course, the location of the repositories points to different locations, but the same package delivery system underlies both LMDE 3 and the Ubuntu-based Tara version of Linux Mint Cinnamon. My only gripe with functionality centers on the useless extensions. I hoped that the experience with Cindy would transcend the longstanding failure of extensions in the Ubuntu-based Cinnamon desktop. It didn't. Almost every extension I tried issued a warning that the extension was not compatible with the current version of the desktop. So in one way at least, the Debian and the Ubuntu versions remain in sync. Neither works -- and yes, both Cinnamon versions were the current 3.8.8.

Other Observations

I was disappointed to see LibreOffice 5 preinstalled rather than the current LibreOffice 6.1. Cindy has both Ubiquity and Calamares installers. I suggest using the Calamares installer. It has a great disk partitioning tool and a more efficient automated installation process. For newcomers, the Linux Mint installer is easier to use, though. As for the kernel, the Cindy version is a bit behind the times. It ships with kernel version 4.9.0-8; my regular Linux Mint distro is updated to 4.15-0-33. Also consider the basic hardware requirements for LMDE. They might not be as accommodating as the Ubuntu version of Linux Mint Cinnamon. You will need at least 1 GB RAM, although 2 GB is recommended for a comfortable fit. Also, 15 GB of disk space is the minimum, although 20 GB is recommended. Here are some additional potential limitations for your hardware: The 64-bit ISO can boot with BIOS or UEFI; The 32-bit ISO can only boot with BIOS; The 64-bit ISO is recommended for all computers sold since 2007 as they are equipped with 64-bit processors.

Bottom Line

If you are considering taking Cindy for a joyride, be sure to check out the release notes for known issues. Also, thoroughly test the live session before installing LMDE 3 to any mission-critical computers. If you do follow through and install the Debian version of Linux Mint, consider the move a short-term computing solution -- that is, unless you like doing a complete system upgrade. LMDE is not a long-term support release. Unlike the five-year support for the regular LTS release with the Ubuntu-based version, Cindy's support runs out perhaps at the end of this year. The developers cannot project an exact release schedule for LMDE 4, either. Lefebvre warned that several potential compatibility issues loom in the near future. For example, Cinnamon 4.0 is likely to be incompatible with Debian Stretch. A contemplated change in the Meson build system may get in the way as well.

Want to Suggest a Review?

Is there a Linux software application or distro you'd like to suggest for review? Something you love or would like to get to know? Please email your ideas to me, and I'll consider them for a future Linux Picks and Pans column. And use the Reader Comments feature below to provide your input! Read the full article

[goodcore101]

What is open source software?

What is open source?

The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible.

The term originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. Today, however, "open source" designates a broader set of values—what we call "the open source way." Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.

What is open source software?

Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

"Source code" is the part of software that most computer users don't ever see; it's the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software—a "program" or "application"—works. Programmers who have access to a computer program's source code can improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don't always work correctly.

What's the difference between open source software and other types of software?

See Also: Open Source vs Proprietary Software

Some software has source code that only the person, team, or organization who created it—and maintains exclusive control over it—can modify. People call this kind of software "proprietary" or "closed source" software.

Only the original authors of proprietary software can legally copy, inspect, and alter that software. And in order to use proprietary software, computer users must agree (usually by signing a license displayed the first time they run this software) that they will not do anything with the software that the software's authors have not expressly permitted. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are examples of proprietary software.

Open source software is different. Its authors make its source code available to others who would like to view that code, copy it, learn from it, alter it, or share it. LibreOffice and the GNU Image Manipulation Program are examples of open source software.

As they do with proprietary software, users must accept the terms of a license when they use open source software—but the legal terms of open source licenses differ dramatically from those of proprietary licenses.

Open source licenses affect the way people can use, study, modify, and distribute software. In general, open source licenses grant computer users permission to use open source software for any purpose they wish. Some open source licenses—what some people call "copyleft" licenses—stipulate that anyone who releases a modified open source program must also release the source code for that program alongside it. Moreover, some open source licenses stipulate that anyone who alters and shares a program with others must also share that program's source code without charging a licensing fee for it.

By design, open source software licenses promote collaboration and sharing because they permit other people to make modifications to source code and incorporate those changes into their own projects. They encourage computer programmers to access, view, and modify open source software whenever they like, as long as they let others do the same when they share their work.

Is open source software only important to computer programmers?

No. Open source technology and open source thinking both benefit programmers and non-programmers.

Because early inventors built much of the Internet itself on open source technologies—like the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server application—anyone using the Internet today benefits from open source software.

Every time computer users view web pages, check email, chat with friends, stream music online, or play multiplayer video games, their computers, mobile phones, or gaming consoles connect to a global network of computers using open source software to route and transmit their data to the "local" devices they have in front of them. The computers that do all this important work are typically located in faraway places that users don't actually see or can't physically access—which is why some people call these computers "remote computers."

More and more, people rely on remote computers when performing tasks they might otherwise perform on their local devices. For example, they may use online word processing, email management, and image editing software that they don't install and run on their personal computers. Instead, they simply access these programs on remote computers by using a Web browser or mobile phone application. When they do this, they're engaged in "remote computing."

Some people call remote computing "cloud computing," because it involves activities (like storing files, sharing photos, or watching videos) that incorporate not only local devices but also a global network of remote computers that form an "atmosphere" around them.

Cloud computing is an increasingly important aspect of everyday life with Internet-connected devices. Some cloud computing applications, like Google Apps, are proprietary. Others, like ownCloud and Nextcloud, are open source.

Cloud computing applications run "on top" of additional software that helps them operate smoothly and efficiently, so people will often say that software running "underneath" cloud computing applications acts as a "platform" for those applications. Cloud computing platforms can be open source or closed source. OpenStack is an example of an open source cloud computing platform.

Why do people prefer using open source software?

People prefer open source software to proprietary software for a number of reasons, including:

Control. Many people prefer open source software because they have more control over that kind of software. They can examine the code to make sure it's not doing anything they don't want it to do, and they can change parts of it they don't like. Users who aren't programmers also benefit from open source software, because they can use this software for any purpose they wish—not merely the way someone else thinks they should.

Training. Other people like open source software because it helps them become better programmers. Because open source code is publicly accessible, students can easily study it as they learn to make better software. Students can also share their work with others, inviting comment and critique, as they develop their skills. When people discover mistakes in programs' source code, they can share those mistakes with others to help them avoid making those same mistakes themselves.

Security. Some people prefer open source software because they consider it more secure and stable than proprietary software. Because anyone can view and modify open source software, someone might spot and correct errors or omissions that a program's original authors might have missed. And because so many programmers can work on a piece of open source software without asking for permission from original authors, they can fix, update, and upgrade open source software more quickly than they can proprietary software.

Stability. Many users prefer open source software to proprietary software for important, long-term projects. Because programmers publicly distribute the source code for open source software, users relying on that software for critical tasks can be sure their tools won't disappear or fall into disrepair if their original creators stop working on them. Additionally, open source software tends to both incorporate and operate according to open standards.

Community. Open source software often inspires a community of users and developers to form around it. That's not unique to open source; many popular applications are the subject of meetups and user groups. But in the case of open source, the community isn't just a fanbase that buys in (emotionally or financially) to an elite user group; it's the people who produce, test, use, promote, and ultimately affect the software they love.

Doesn't "open source" just mean something is free of charge?

No. This is a common misconception about what "open source" implies, and the concept's implications are not only economic.

Open source software programmers can charge money for the open source software they create or to which they contribute. But in some cases, because an open source license might require them to release their source code when they sell software to others, some programmers find that charging users money for software services and support (rather than for the software itself) is more lucrative. This way, their software remains free of charge, and they make money helping others install, use, and troubleshoot it.

While some open source software may be free of charge, skill in programming and troubleshooting open source software can be quite valuable. Many employers specifically seek to hire programmers with experience working on open source software.

Content Source: https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source

[dezid744-blog]

Why you should change from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (and why you shouldn’t)libreOffice’s 5.1 refresh included help for Windows 10.

A casual adjustment of LibreOffice was starting late exchanged to the Microsoft Store, anyway now doesn't office.com/myaccount show up at whatever point looked direct in the store. It's up 'til now open by methods for LibreOffice's site, be that as it may.

To know more click here: mcafee.com/activate

While the adjustment of LibreOffice that was available through the Microsoft Store isn't authentic, it's a quality programming suite that makes one wonder,Is it worth changing from Microsoft Office?

I've used Microsoft Office since Windows 95. In any case, I researched LibreOffice after it arrived in the Microsoft Store. It's propelled me, anyway it's reasonableness as an office suite depends, as it were, on your setup.

Get to know more: techwebpassion

Here are a couple of reasons why you should pick LibreOffice over Microsoft Office, and a couple of reasons why you shouldn't. LibreOffice is available in vain on Windows 10, Mac, and Linux through Libre Office's site.

See Office 365 at Microsoft Download LibreOffice

Inspiration to switch: Value

The essential thing that catches the eye about LibreOffice is the sticker cost, or even more unequivocally the nonappearance of one. LibreOffice at first forked off of OpenOffice and has been reliably kept up and made consistently. It's a champion among the best free office suites of employments around and has programs for word dealing with, spreadsheets,introductions, and that is just a glimpse of a larger problem. It is a versatile and mind blowing plan of activities, anyway it's essential that it mimics the more settled focus course of action of uses from Microsoft Office and doesn't have partners to progressively current undertakings like OneNote.

Get to know more: techcare3

While there are many word processors and poor or free tasks that try to pass on a full office setup, Libre Office is a standout amongst the most broad. Its wide extent of uses handles most by a long shot of office-related work forms. In addition, it does the majority of this to no end.

It supports open arrangements that empower you to use chronicles from various ventures so you don't have to isolate yourself or your work procedure into a Libre Office world.

The estimation of LibreOffice is extremely incredible. It's essentially a promotion for the open source organize in light of how exceptional of an application you can legitimately get to no end.

Inspiration to switch: Dedicated architects

While LibreOffice is free, it's not some apathetic undertaking. It's routinely kept up and invigorated to help the latest adjustments of Windows 10. The suite can in like manner be reached out with developments to incorporate more power and adaptability.

While that most likely won't seem, by all accounts, to be a noteworthy trial, a few applications that are attempted to reproduce or direct opponent gigantic names fall away likewise, advance toward getting to be abandonware. LibreOffice released refreshes over the latest couple of months to the two its "Still" and "New" branches. Since of this, you don't need to worry over LibreOffice falling without end. All markers exhibit that it is alive and well and won't go wherever anytime sooner rather than later. Notwithstanding whether it did, you wouldn't have to worry in light of the way that your chronicles would be in open arrangements.

Reasons NOT to switch: Cloud limitations

One of the best domains these two suites veer is by they way they approach on the web and cross-organize work forms.

Microsoft places seriously in the cloud to allow you to open and extra reports wherever you'd like. It in like manner focuses around having applications on an arrangement of hardware, reaching out from PCs to tablets and phones. LibreOffice is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, yet iOS and Android are compelled to study archives simply aside from in the event that you turn on preliminary features.

If you need to save something on one contraption and bob to another and continue changing, you'll be in a perfect world overhauled by Microsoft Office. You can do electronic modifying with things, for instance, Collabora and ownCloud, anyway that is more tangled to set up than simply checking into your Microsoft account. Microsoft Office moreover handles joint exertion from various editors better than LibreOffice.

Much like the straggling leftovers of this connection, how much this impacts you will change. I use an individual PC, work MacBook, work iPad, and individual Android phone. I use Office Online routinely and use two various OneDrive records for work and individual use. Thusly, for me, these features are major, and I could never show signs of change a long way from Microsoft Office. Regardless, you could have an absolutely unmistakable work process that would be unprecedented for you focused on using LibreOffice on select devices and saving them onto a cloud like Dropbox.

So would it be a smart thought for you to change from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice?

Changing to LibreOffice over Microsoft Office is, as it were, subject to your specific work process. While LibreOffice plainly is an unrivaled regard since you're getting something to no end, that isn't a factor to someone as of now's personality lively to pay for Office 365 for things like OneDrive accumulating or someone that gets Office 365 through their workplace or school.

Differentiating the abilities of the two suites is progressively tangled. It isn't as fundamental as saying that one is better. In case you glance through this page differentiating the capacities you'll see that the suites substitute the extent that which is better from zone to portion. For example, LibreOffice allows you to install more things, for instance, vector structures and FLAC sound, anyway Microsoft Office has better touch sponsorship and better cross-organize composed exertion features. My proposal to the extent features it to scrutinize through each suite and see which obliges your own needs best.

LibreOffice is extraordinary, and in light of the way that it's free you can give it a shot while up 'til now paying for Microsoft Office. My suggestion is that on the off chance that you're, out it an endeavor while keeping your Office 365 enrollment and thereafter settle on an inexorably ceaseless decision.

Finally, LibreOffice could save you some basic cash.

[simon-frey-eu]

How switching my parents over to Linux saved me a lot of headache and support calls

During me being at my parents over the holidays (Christmas 2017) I had the usual IT-support stuff to do, that always happens to tech savvy kids when they are back at home.

As I am a happy Linux user for over a decade now, I asked myself if it would be a good idea to switch my parents away from Win 10 to a GNU/Linux (I will call it only Linux during the rest of the post. Sorry Richard ;) ) based system.

I did that and now 2 years later I still think it was a good idea: I have the peace of mind, that their data is kinda safe and they also call me less often regarding any technical issues with the system. (Yes, Win 10 confused them more than Ubuntu does).

In the following I would like to describe this ongoing journey and how you can follow my example.

The post is structured in three parts:

Preparation

Switching over

Ongoing improvements

Conclusion

Please keep in mind, that this setup is my very own solution and it is likely, that you need to tweak it to your needs. Disclaimer: I do not care about "FOSS only" or something.

Preparation

Background about my parents computer usage: They mainly use their machine for email and web stuff (shopping, social media, online banking,...) and are not heavily into hardware intense gaming or so.

As my parents already used a lot of Free Software as their daily drivers (Thunderbird, Firefox) I did not had to do a big preparation phase. But still I switch them (still on their Win 10) to LibreOffice so that they could get used to it, before changing the whole system.

That is my first big advice for your:

Try to not overwhelm them with to much new interfaces at once. Use a step by step solution.

So first of all, keep them on their current system and help them to adapt to FLOSS software that will be their main driver on the Linux later on.

So two steps for preparation here:

1) Sit down with your folks and talk trough their daily usage of their computer (Please be not so arrogant to think you already know it all)

2) Try to find software replacements for their daily drivers, that will work flawlessly later on the Linux machine. The ones I would recommend are:

Firefox as Browser (and maybe Email if they prefere webmail)

Thunderbird for Emails

GIMP for Image Editing

VLC as Media Player

LibreOffice instead of MS Office

So as you now did find out and setup replacements for the proprietary Windows software, you should give them time to adapt. I think a month would be suitable. (FYI: I got the most questions during this time, the later switch was less problematic)

Switching over

So your parents now got used to the new software and that will help you to make them adapt easier to the new system, as they now only have to adapt to the new OS interface and not additionally also to a lot new software interfaces.

Do yourself a favor and use standard Ubuntu

I know there are a ton of awesome Linux distros out there (Btw. I use Arch ;)) but my experience during this journey brought me to the conclusion, that the standard Ubuntu is still the best. It is mainly because, all the drivers work mostly out of the box and the distro does a lot automatically. (Because of that, my parents where able to install a new wireless printer without even calling me...beat that Gentoo ;))

On top of that: The Ubuntu community multilingual and open for newbies.

The journey until Ubuntu

Until Ubuntu we tried different other distros, all suffering at some point (Please bear in mind, that this are all awesome projects and for myself they would work 100%, but for no technical people as my parents a distro just needs to be real solid):

1) Chalet Os as it was promoted as most lookalike to Windows. As it is based on XFCE it is lightweight, but the icons and styles differ all over the UI. So you get confused because the settings icon always looks different, depending where in the system you are.

2) Elementary OS because I love the UI myself. No clue why, but my parents never got warm with it. It is just a bit to far away from what they are used to.

3) Solus OS has again a more windows looking ui and it worked better for my parents. But after all you have to say Solus is just not there yet. The package manager has to less packages and whenever you have a problem it is super hard to find a solution on the net. Plus: The UI crashed at least once a day. (IMO a driver problem with the machine, but still after hours of work we did not find a solution.)

4) Finally Ubuntu](https://www.ubuntu.com/) and that now works nice and smooth (For over 8 month now)

Nuke and pave

So you selected the distro and are now able to nuke and pave the machine. I think I do not have to explain in-depth how to do that, just two important things:

Backup all you parents data to an external hard drive (Copy the complete C: drive)

Write down upfront what software you want to install and make sure you also backup the configuration and data of those

**Cheating: ** If you want to amaze with the new system even more and the machine is still on a HDD, replace it with a SSD, so the Linux system feels even better and faster ;)

Configuration

After you installed the distro, do a complete configuration. (Yes, go trough every setting and tweak it if needed)

Now install the software your folks already used on their Windows machine and make sure it is configured in the exact same way as it was on the old system! (That will help a lot in keeping the moral up, because then their is already something that feels familiar to them)

I found, that it is best to place the shortcuts of the applications your parents use the most in bar on the left side on Ubuntu, so they find them easily

Sit down with your parents and ask them, what data the need from the old system and copy only that over. Hereby you clean up the file system by not copying over the old crap they did not use for ages and if they find out later, that there is more data they need it is stored on the backup drive.

Introduce them to the new system

After the configuration and setup is now complete you need to allocate some time for introducing them to the new system. You know you parents best so do it in the way the like it.

For me the following routine worked best:

0) Explain it to them in two individual sessions (as mostly one of them is more tech savvy then the other one and so both have the chance to ask you individually)

1) Shutdown the machine

2) Let him/her start the machine

3) Tell her/him to try to do their daily business and whenever questions come up explain how to solve the issue (Never touch the mouse or keyboard! If you take it over, it is very likely that you will be to fast)

4) Stop after 60 minutes and if there are still questions do another session the next day (Imagine yourself learning something completely new to you - maybe Chinese - are you able to concentrate more than an hour?)

Some topics I would recommend you to cover during the introduction:

How to setup a new wifi connection (especially if the machine is a laptop)

How to install new software

How to setup a new printer/scanner

How to print/scan

How to restore deleted files

How to get data from/to a USB-stick or mobile device

How to shutdown the machine (not that easy to find on Ubuntu)

Ongoing improvements

So normally now the system should work as intended and if you are lucky it saves you a lot of problems in the future. In this section I will give you some more recommendations, that helped to make the experience even better:

Linux does always ask you for your password if you are doing something that could deeply harm the system. So I told my parents: Whenever that dialog (I showed it to them) pops up, they should keep in mind, that they could destroy the whole machine with this operation and if they want they can call me first.

Show them the app store and tell them, whatever they install from there is save (so no viruses or something) and they can install everything they want as long it is from there. It makes fun to find new cool software and games, so help them to experience that fun too :D

Backups! As it is really easy with Linux you should do a automatic daily/hourly backup of their complete home folder. I use borg for that. (I plan to to write an in-depth blog post about borg in the future, it will be linked here if it is done). So now, whenever my parents call me and tell me that they deleted something or that the machine does not boot anymore I can relax and tell them, that we can restore all there data in a matter of minutes....you can't image how good that makes me feel.

It is not FOSS, but I did install google chrome as it was the easiest for watching netflix and listening to spotify.

I would recommend installing some privacy plugins and stuff into the browser your parents use, so you get them even saver.

If you have some software that does not have a good replacement, try to use wine for it. Worked well with MS Office 2007. (Sorry LibreOffice, but you still can't compete with MS here). PlayOnLinux did help me a lot with the wine setup

If possible activate the automatic update and installation of all security updates.

Conclusion

For me the switch made a lot of sense, as my parents are not heavy technical users of there systems. Should yours be into Photoshop, video editing or gaming I do not think it will be so easy to do the switch over, as Linux and its software is still not a good competitor in this areas.

I would love to get your feedback on this blog post: Did you switch your parents to Linux and how did that work out? Do you have other insights that should be added to this post? Hit me up via meet@simon-frey.eu

Thanks for reading! Simon Frey

p.S. One reason why my parents machine did not boot anymore for several times, was a plugged in usb stick and the bios tried to boot from it. So do not forget to reset the boot order to first boot of the hard drive ;)

Did you like this post?

Donate: or

Feedback: Email

RSS Feed - This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Old Tux Image Source (CC BY-SA 3.0): https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/mint-xfce-old.html

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 38

Well hello folks and welcome back to the world of Linux Life.  Not much happening regarding machines this episode as I have been exceptionally busy but there is a few topics regarding Linux which has been pretty prominent lately I would like to discuss.  This is probably going to be a long episode... you have been warned.

Topic 1 - Why is Linux not seen as a major desktop system.

This is an interesting discussion as given that Linux costs the huge price of absolutely nothing.  How come now that its about 15 years old is it not dominating Windows as the desktop OS environment.  Majority of the software is free and it should have a much larger reach than it currently has.

Thing is it is still seen as an operating system for geeks.  Linux installation is much easier than it ever was.  I’m a guy who started with Slackware and can remember having to do everything from text prompts.  Now everything is graphical and straightforward.  It will even set up to dual boot if the right options are selected or at least show you how to do so via a tutorial.

So what is real problem if not installation.  Application support is primarily seen by many as there is no Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, No FL Studio or Cubase products.

Now all of these can be run by Wine in Linux but they can only run the 32 bit versions of said software although 64 bit support is improving. Wine is constantly improving so more software running is becoming much easier.

However there is alternatives to said programs such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Kdenlive and Davinci Resolve. For music your have Ardour and Rosegarden.  Now I understand it would require major relearning of your workflow which will take time and effort which you may not be able to afford.

Linux has Firefox, Chrome, Opera and all the usual browsers so Internet is not a problem.  Also most wifi cards now have a driver automatically recognised.  A small number of cards don’t but compared to the early years it’s vastly improved.  It recognised about five wifi cards if you were lucky.

Linux also had many mail applications such as Thunderbird, Twitter support with Corebird and much more. So this is no longer a problem.

Now Gaming was always a stumbling point for Linux.  However Steam has been available for Linux for a number of years now and several games have a Linux version.  Recently Valve have started working with CodeWeavers the people behind the Wine project to create the Proton project.

This allows Steam to play Windows games in your Steam library using a modified Wine installation wrapper.  It runs quite a lot of games but currently is still in beta.  In time more and more games will work as the Proton driver is improved.  Also as Valve are working with the Wine guys it will also help it run various applications as the code will be available to it.

Linux is far more customizable than Windows.  Don’t like the look or setup.  You can normally move stuff or if you want replace the Windows Manager with one more to your preference.  While changing WM is not easy it can be done.  However theming and desktop modification is normally reasonably simple.

Also don’t need certain drivers then you can remove most of them bar the essentials.

The thing is with Linux is for all it’s getting much better, it’s still a bit technical when it goes wrong.  Reinstalling software doesn’t always fix things like it does in Windows.

A lot of things still require terminal commands.  However distributions like Arch or any other rolling release tend to do most things in GUIs and only occasionally do you need a terminal.

Until they find a true way to minimise this and make fixing issues much easier it will remain a fringe operating system.  Mind you how many people go hunting with RegEdit on Windows so it can be a pain equally at times.

Linux has the advantage of malware and viruses are virtually none existent due to rights management and if any bugs are found they are normally fixed pretty quickly.

So maybe in three to five years Linux may be where it should be then it may start to dominate.  We may even have Mir by then but I wouldn’t put money on it.  Funny thing is because it’s free a lot of people distrust it which is odd.  They figure if you are giving it away for free it must have something wrong with it.

Topic 2 - Microsoft is now getting involved with Linux.  What?

Well its pretty well documented that Microsoft now have their own Linux based Azure Sphere OS.  However to program anything for Azure Sphere you need a Windows installation and Visual Studio to do so.  Which is kind of counterproductive if you ask me.

Also they have a seat on the board of The Linux Foundation meaning they get a vote in the way that Linux progresses.  They have open sourced various patents to the OIN (Open Invention Network) but the only people who gain advantage with this are existing OIN members.

It’s easy to see why many don’t trust Microsoft being involved.  Many ditched Windows to be away from their incessant spying and fiddling.  Also they have not had the best things to say about Linux.  Admittedly this was primarily when Steve Ballmer was the CEO of the company and now that Satya Nadella has taken the reins it has changed it’s stance.

“Linux is a cancer” - Steve Ballmer (1 June 2001)

Ballmer admitted in 2016 he hated it then but he now loves Linux but he had been left Microsoft for 2 years by then.

Most Linux people who have been around for a bit also remember that Microsoft sued several Linux Distro providers due to patent usage so when they announced they liked Linux and would even defend it if necessary.  Many Linux users were sceptical.

Also their recent acquisition of GitHub has raised concerns as many of the Linux Open Source projects are based on there and with Microsoft in charge what sort of issues will this present.

While understandably sceptical about Microsoft being involved with Linux.  They will probably fund many things to improve the way things are done in Linux especially useful regarding things like drivers.  As they can throw millions at it and not bat an eyelid.

However it’s equally dangerous because this goes back to a Microsoft philosophy that makes many nervous.  The philosophy is Embrace, Enhance and Extinguish.  This is where they introduce themselves to a system.  Add and convert many programs to standards written by Microsoft, then extinguish by leaving such programs without update making users move to something else.

While it will be virtually impossible to extinguish Linux.  The fact that Azure Sphere can only have programs written using Visual Studio.  Microsoft are already starting on the what it calls the Enhance stage.

They think that Visual Studio has enhanced the way to write Linux software.  Many I am sure would disagree vehemently.  If enough Windows guys take it up then there could be trouble on the horizon.

Several people think Linux is already getting a bit bloated without Microsoft attempting to fill up your hard drive.

There is even a version of the Linux Subsystem for Windows available for Windows 10 should you feel you want it.  This allows you to run Linux binaries under Windows 10 using a wrapper to put them on your desktop instead of using a VM.

It’s a double edged sword as I see it.  They could help get drivers and support for applications due to funding the Linux Foundation but equally they could totally start clogging up the Linux system with proprietary software.

What do you think?

Topic 3 - Video Editing on Linux?

Recently a Youtuber by the name of EposVox (Adam Taylor) had a bit of a meltdown regarding trying to switch from Windows to Linux regarding video editing on his channel.

Now he was trying to use Davinci Resolve 15 as his primary video editor and I believe he was using Kubuntu to begin with.  Now EposVox has featured many videos on his channel regarding Linux and  certain aspects of it.

He was certainly no beginner.  However he found first he could not access his video footage from external drives as they were ExFAT.  Now Kubuntu does not supply them by default.  However you can install them using apt-get.

Then when he did files to Linux using USB, he discovered Davinci Resolve 15 Free Edition did not have the codecs to read the videos as they were in 4K H.264 format. So he had to install Davinci Resolve 15 Studio but to do so he had to transfer one of the keys from one of his Windows machines.

Now the program could read his videos but would regularly crash for no apparent reason due to video driver issues.  In frustration he eventually gave up.

He also tried it under Linux Mint 19 which did include the ExFAT drivers but once again Davinci Resolve 15 Studio would just crash randomly due to video driver issues.

This caused him to post his video rant.  Now many tried to defend Linux saying he didn’t know what he was doing.  This I find hard to believe.  He had championed Linux for a while so he was far from incompetent.

However it does seem when it comes to using 4K video under normal Linux conditions, problems do tend to occur.  This is because they have not really got true codec support from the manufacturers.

A lot of the drivers have probably been written by enthusiasts who just wanted to see if it could be done so they probably are not the best drivers available.

Since camera manufacturers such as RED and other makers of 4K or higher cameras work almost exclusively with Microsoft or Apple.  Linux is left out in the cold as it’s not paying them millions of dollars for drivers.

Most Linux content creators are running under 4K, normally 1080p is the limit.  Now I know the BBC use Linux for their editing but it has probably been specifically built for them and if they want the drivers they can afford to pay for them.

Until Linux gets competent 4K video codec support a lot of profession video editors will probably stick with the likes of Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro X.

Kdenlive has improved vastly over the years also there is OpenShot and Lightworks but they all seem to be under optimised or missing features video editors want.

It’s not that Linux is bad at video editing.  Once again I think it is something that they will get in time but for now anyone using 4K camera footage will have not the greatest of time working in the Linux environment.

I could be wrong about 4K video being awkward under Linux but that seems to be the opinion out there currently.

I have had issues running Davinci Resolve in the past so I can understand it can be frustrating.  It is very finicky with it’s setup and is far from stable under Linux.  Works fine under Windows however.

Topic 4 - New Mac ? No Linux for you then...

Well it seems Apple have finally found a way to lock out Linux from  the new 2018 range of Apple Macs.  Due to the implementation of the current T2 security chip it has locked out Linux.

The current T2 chip has also caused issues regarding upgrading.  If you upgrade a new Mac yourself and don’t get an Apple registered service member to do it.  The likelihood is MacOS Mojave will not start.

The reason being that Apple have supplied software to their Apple registered engineers that allows them to reset the T2 security chip so it will start MacOS.  Without this you will just get a black screen if you do it yourself.

Well this same T2 security chip is now locking out Linux so it can’t boot.  Previously Linux got around Mac boot issues by using the Windows Production CA 2011 certificate.

Apparently New Macs block Windows 10 too until you enable it in the Boot Camp settings.  However Linux does not have that luxury.

So is this the end of Linux on new Mac machines or do you think Apple will give them access.  I can only imagine this would happen if Apple were paid a considerable amount of money.

If those who hack it decide to put their findings on the Internet so Linux can be booted.  Be prepared as Apple are notoriously famous for sending legal teams after people.

I’m sure the likes of Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE will eventually cough up some money but other smaller distributions may not be able to afford such.

Sad really and eventually they will find a way around it probably just bypassing the T2 security chip all together and making it think it sees a T2 chip that will let it past.

Anyway that’s enough waffle for this episode.  Hopefully next time I will have more to report on what I have actually been doing with Linux not just general news opinion.

Until next time... Take Care.