I bought a Brother colour laser last year (which on the outside looks identical to the monochrome one I bought 17 years ago that lives with my parents), zero issues, which pretty much has been my experience with printers on linux (also tried a ~5 y/o & 25 y/o HP LaserJet, one being the cheapest thing I’ve ever used, other being old office equipment, think I tried the Epson ecotank and photo printer my mil has as well)

It’s not terrible advice tbh, even just hand sketches are solid for getting ideas down, makes it easy to translate to cad. It at least helps me think things through and the like.

Get a few pencils with different leads (some harder stuff like 2-4H and an HB) and some nice paper and you’re good, but really anything works, totally have a mockup of my garage on a whiteboard planning where I want to put stuff.

As for cad packages, freecad, as far as I’m aware there are some architecture workbench plugins, and there’s a tech drawing workbench. Coming back to cad after a while I found it super easy to pick back up (coming from solidworks at least)

For most people though yeah, Debian is rock solid, only went arch on my desktop for nvidia drivers (and HDR), archinstall really simplifies installing it.

Arch and Debian wikis are both amazing sources of information, highly recommend for any distro.

As far as I’m aware, a lot of the core utilities originate back some time ago, stuff like ls, CD, chmod/chown, cat, sed, awk etc.

Now the question is, is a piece of software that’s been maintained or ported since the 70s considered pre 79 software?

From the arch wiki

sudo -e {file}

Set SUDO_EDITOR in your profile to the editor of your choice, benefit is it retains your user profile for that editor, it’s also less to type. For stuff like editing sudoers you’re supposed to use visudo to edit that. Others can probably give better/more thorough reasons to consider it.

Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don’t think it’s helpful either to preload people with the belief that it’s some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.

Can’t really say it’s 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I’ve depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I’ve seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.

Be honest that I don’t see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of “I browse the internet and use office programs”, you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren’t setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.

Haven’t looked into it but do shops offer lube analysis services? Yeah you could send out your own sample to a lab, having it as a shop service would be way more accessible to people.

Though, in my experience, getting people to commit can be a pain, lots of “yeah I know we have a long p-f interval and it’s super noticeable before it functionally fails, but it’s not that much effort so I’m doing needless maintenance anyhow just in case”, which end of the day you do you.

I’ve used Thunderbird since forever as my go-to client, I used mutt as well for a while and that met my needs pretty well.

Powershell, windows terminal and winget are all legitimately nice tools, powershell especially is just stupidly more powerful than it needs to be (and verb-noun syntax is great).

Found upgrades mildly annoying with GitLab, big reason I moved to Forgejo for my personal stuff. Far easier to setup and maintain for me, seems to be happy with caddy and runners are really easy to setup.

I’m not hosting for an entire org though, it’s just me and I keep all my selfhost stuff local only, so obviously YMMV.

What are y’all doing that you need to troubleshoot constantly? My experience with arch is about the same as my experience with Debian.

Was a kubuntu person for a long time, I haven’t really loved the default Ubuntu DE for a while, but that’s personal preferences. At the end of the day, use what you like.

I personally like debian (swapped from Kubuntu over time) but keep mint on my thumb drive for family who needs something on older hardware, especially those used to windows it seems to be an easy jump. I love that there are so many options available to people with various levels of prepackaging and configurations.

While I get that, Debian fits that role extremely well.

Mine are a bit more recent (2012-202*) but same thing. Old hardware gets used for something, my “server” is just my old i5 11500k with as much ram as I could throw at it and as many drives as I can fit in the case. Oldest is a laptop that’s my bench computer.

Helps me justify upgrades, hardware’s been capable for a long time, always impressive to me just how capable things are, and sometimes it’s part of the fun (if you enjoy problem solving) to work around limitations. Off-lease enterprise stuff interests me, would need to figure out where it lives though.

Not used nix so can’t comment on that, aura is a pacman wrapper + aur helper -S for package operations, -A for aur, gives you similar options too so -Au to update like -Su in pacman. Has a lot of other options that I’m probably not taking advantage of, but for me, gives me a single place to manage most everything (flathub too but I don’t use a lot of flatpaks, just nice to have)

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I’ve used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I’m comfortable with it and it’s supported in every cloud environment I’ve touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

I’ve got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I’d go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don’t find much of a difference beyond package management.

Sunshine works perfectly fine with nvidia on linux for me, what issue have you run into?

I’m running a 4070ti on the most recent nvidia open source drivers on arch for reference.

Enough people mention it that I’ve jumped over to helix

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.+Linux4004

Blog post if interested

Aussie Techmoan with Ashens for good measure.