I see your edit, and would like to comment that you also haven’t mentioned which rpi you were going to try this on. I recently wanted to set up a quick little pc using a rpi, just so I could browse the web and maybe watch some videos. Tried a rpi2 I had laying around. No way. Moved to a rpi3, and while it would load most pages, youtube was a bust as it completely maxed out the ram and swap. I then went to a rpi4 with 8gb and it has been doable, kind of. Sometimes it’s pretty choppy with the video, but basic web browsing is ok. I did try my plex the other day through the browser and it was barely acceptable. Lots of stuttering and sometimes just hangs, but that’s not the ideal way to view plex on anything. Haven’t tried my rpi5 yet, but my point to all this is that I think you are on the right track setting it up on a spare pc he has. If you had given him a rpi as a ‘desktop’ replacement it might have just soured him on the whole idea.

Doesn’t matter, but they contradict themselves.

Headline: why isn’t everyone using it?
Body: This article breaks down what Linux is, why it’s great and how it secretly powers most of your favorite devices, from smartphones to servers.

So it looks like most everyone is using it, they just might not realize it. Which to me is a sign of a great product, when it’s use is completely transparent.

Honestly that’s a lot of windows users. I have to deal with it at work because we are ‘a microsoft shop’. Ughh. I am in a relationship that I cannot get out of, sort of an arranged marriage. Retirement can’t come soon enough.

Will make all the files in the path owned by you. Be careful if you have more complex permissions on there they will be lost.

This is where ACL permissions would help. He could give his new id ACL permissions to the files and that wouldn’t mess with the current permissions.

From the root/beginning subdir: sudo setfacl -R -m u:{replace with your new id}:rwx .

If Linux cannot help me do them then in what way is it a widely suitable mass operating system as proponents are constantly claiming instead of merely a hobby tool that can do a very limited range of things.

Not sure what you mean by this as I have used tons of linux machines to earn a living for the last 20 years or more. Just because you haven’t delved into it doesn’t mean it is just a hobby tool. No offense, but if that is your attitude towards this then it might be best to not switch. Things might not always be up to par with what you are used to, but I have seen some pretty cringy things go on in current mainstream windows. Try having an issue with onedrive and asking the team supporting it to help. First step is to reboot. If that doesn’t work they uninstall then reinstall. If that doesn’t work, well then I guess you are out of luck. When I asked them about anything in the log files, all I got was blanks stares. My point is, windows isn’t some pristine environment with no flaws that we should all strive to reach, it has it’s own issues.

For instance, your Notepad++ question. I know you don’t want to use multiple tools to replace it, but I would venture to guess that the work I do daily, I would probably come up with solutions using vi, sed, and awk on the command line just as fast as you could using the gui. The thing is, I have been doing it for so long it’s just second nature to me. Would I want to switch to Notepad++, no.

Maybe come up with some examples of what you do in Notepad++ and people can give you alternative solutions.

My distro had an update for cups, so I am guessing people are already on this. Pop Os is what I just loaded on this machine.

You don’t think I got this rich by writing checks, do you?

Secondly, I’d attempt to write a bash script to walk a directory tree, cat out files, pipe it through grep and get every instance where VirtualBox is mentioned in a file. Trying the name of proccess, or of the executable too.

Move to the top of the tree you want to search and do something like this:

find . -type f -exec grep -iH “virtualboxexecutable” {} ;

That will give you what you want without the need for a script. -type f makes the find command only search files, and -exec has it run the grep command on any files it returns with -iH giving you case insensitive results showing you the file it’s found in. Substitute ‘virtualboxexecutable’ with whatever the process name is that is being run. If you want to ignore binary files, the add in "| grep -iv “binary file matches” to the command. That will strip out any results where it has searched a binary file.

Does the uid you are using to run nginx have permissions to read the root folder (defined above as /var/www/html/partviewer/public , not the actual linux root) and below?