Famously, Nvidia drivers contain hacks for lots of games. Nvidia takes the crappy games and writes work arounds into the drivers to make the games work.

We should. It’s a good abstractions for document conversion.

GPU drivers and DEs lagging behind, mostly.

Something like Fedora which releases newer code quicker will provide a better desktop/laptop experience. It’s the same reason other stable distros, like the EL distros, aren’t the best for desktops/laptops.

Historically, desktop applications would also be versions behind, but Flatpak really helps with this.

At this point, Debian is probably fine as a distro for a few year old computer that won’t be helped by fractional scaling. Pick a DE and install applications from Flathub.

Vim/Emacs + Some Markup Language + LaTeX Template + Pandoc

Yeah, word processors are garbage.

Oddly, Google Docs is the least junky one, probably because JS had a bunch of limitations at the time it was started, and Google had to limit the features.

I’ve been pretty happy with Pandoc, some LaTeX, and scripts. It’s not for everyone, but it works for me.

Are someone’s TikToks not trending anymore? 😆

There, there little guy. Why don’t you stand up your own blue sky server?

The ridiculousness of hauling a RPi around everywhere I go so I can access files on a flash drive is exactly the point. LOL

Although, something like the NitroKey Storage is close to the same thing. It’s a small computer with flash storage. Packaging, I guess. LOL

Veracrypt would be one more thing to bootstrap when standing up a new computer, and I’d like to keep the amount of prep work I have to do to a new box before it’s usable to a minimum.

Endlessly tweaking systems to get it into a usable state is why I left Windows, and like to keep the complexity in my life to a minimum.

Honestly, it’s only annoying when moving between FOSS operating systems. MacOS not supporting luks, or whatever, is slightly annoying, but FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux not agreeing to make me shake my head.

I’ve thought about Doom, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it out. Finding the time to sit down and learn it hasn’t been a high priority.

Yeah, I daily drive spacemacs. 🙂

https://www.spacemacs.org/

The vim key bindings are a lot better.

I have, and it introduces a dependency, which can be a problem when software can’t be installed. I’d rather have support as part of the base OS.

Interesting. I’ll check those out. 🙂

I’ve looked at osquery. It was all the rage for a minute in the monitoring industry when Facebook released it, and then it didn’t really go anywhere.

Many of the chipsets used in older laptops don’t have Linux drivers or firmware for some chips. Oddly, more recently modern laptops have better support.

The 2012 MacBook Air uses the Broadcom BCM943224PCIEBT2 chipset, which is flaky under Linux when it’s working. At least that was my experience with my Mac Mini. Broadcom doesn’t like people using their hardware, especially that era, so they’re a problem.

Nvidia. I ordered a refurbished ThinkPad P1, and it showed up with a Nvidia card. There are problems waking up from sleep and sessions crashing that I don’t have with the iGPU devices which have FOSS drivers.

Electron apps. They eat RAM, but it’s the only way some apps are delivered.

MacOS can setup independent virtual desktops on each monitor, but Gnome has independent virtual desktops on only the main monitor with the others static. It can be set for all the monitors to change at the same time, but that’s not what I’m after.

LUKS is Linux only. There isn’t a cross platform way to do FDE on removable media.

Efi partitions use FAT FS. Why is this in the spec?

Only some manufacturers support LVFS. There isn’t a standardized mechanism for firmware updates, and many manufacturers don’t bother.

Gnome doesn’t have a profile export feature.

BTRFS is still a work in progress after all these years. Subvolume space quotas still aren’t recommended for use and encryption is “coming soon”. The tooling is a mess, no per subvolume mount options, no converting an existing folder to a subvolume. It mostly works, but ZFS is still nicer.

LibreOffice doesn’t have an “easy” mode similar to Google Docs and it doesn’t have a vim mode. Sometimes I just want to write, and not fiddle with every little detail.

This is heavily dependent on the printer driver used.

My bother does this until I install the CUPS PPD from brother.

Newer process are moving to a driverless IPP model, which should help with this.

I’m not sure what app that is.

Software upgrades package on Fedora without requiring a password, so that future is a reality for some.

Reading up on PolKit and ACLs would probably be good.

Desktop management wasn’t, and isn’t, a priority. Managing fleets of servers has been the focus, and the Linux vendors make most of their money selling server distros.

It can be done, but it has to be built using the raw tools available. This is a strength and a weakness. Strength because it’s super flexible, and a weakness because random IT person has to know what they’re doing.

There are some projects like FreeIPA, Gnome FleetCommander, SaltStack, and Foreman which have parts. There’s nothing turn key like Intune or Jamf though. Plus this is all based on on-prem stuff. We’re not even touching on Entra replacements.

KDE can probably do this with enough time and effort.

I used to work at a company where this was in the KB. 😐

Zsh is but more for interactivity. The extended file globbing, extended auto completion, and loadable modules are the main reasons I like it. The features really shine when used with a configuration framework like ohmyzsh.

Supposedly, Zsh has a more comprehensive shell scripting syntax, but that’s not a plus since I don’t want to write shell scripts.