I work in IT at a company who uses outlook, but has locked down the phones so the users can’t install anything.

I can say without a reason of the doubt that outlook on Android is hateful.

It’s still a 2010 era android app with non of the desktop features working. Like the signature not syncing with your saved ones. And focused inbox hiding important emails.

But since the phones are locked down. These dark patten ads are twice as annoying since the user thinks there phone is broken. They just removed the Microsoft 2fa prompts on setup. But I saw this and almost cried.

Don’t assume that users are smart enough to read or understand how this works. They press buttons until it works. If we didn’t force google play to not allow edge to download our users would’ve been in a much harder situation to support.

Not when it’s not installing because of the lack of swap

It works with a usb bluray drive. Though I got an internal bluray drive for my PC

MakeMKV to backup the contents and if you need it in a different format Handbrake so it can be converted to MP4.

A $50 used ipad is always a better deal than a $80 fire tablet

What I did was I went to the thrift store and I found a laptop. It was the Asus Transformer Book T100han.

I had one when it was new. It was a POS but hey it worked really well in my use case I was thinking of.

Got it home booted it, has Windows 10 1501 installed on it. Refused the update. (The perfect windows machine does exists)

Updated it to 22h2 bricked it by running out of the limited 32GB of storage.

Said screw it got Linux Mint on a USB installer. Installer crashes. Tries Ubuntu… also crashes. Tries OpenSuse, also crashes. Tries Fedora also crashes.

Turns out the installer requires more than 2GB of ram. Laptop only has 2 and it’s soldered. (The e waste special)

Gets Debian installs it. Gets to desktop, no Bluetooth, no audio, but everything else runs better than I ever saw it. Needs older distro.

Gets Q4OS installs fine, runs as well and audio works. No Bluetooth. My very specific use case requires Bluetooth.

Forces myself to go back to windows. No recovery image. Downloads from MS, can’t create media because my PC is on Linux. Boots into VM, makes installer. Installs Windows. No audio no Bluetooth.

Gets drivers from asus website. Everything works but audio. Calls asus support gets drivers. PC is back to when I got it.

Pair Bluetooth controller, installs auto hotkeys, installs libre office. Best teleprompter I’ve ever used.

Shoves into box until it’s needed again.

Cinnamon for 2 reasons

1. KDE is missing a lot of features which still only works in Gnome. Like the taskbar Calendar app syncing events with services like Google Calendar

2. cinnamon is extremely stable and doesn’t move your icons around when you connect to an external display with your laptop and the display has a different resolution.

You loose out on automatic updates and not all packages are easy to build. I am not personally familiar with building Gimp. But I’ve tried to build other projects from GitHub only to get errors I couldn’t decipher.

It’s a skill which not many have.

Debian/Ubuntu/Mint packages are always older and only get updated once everything is stable.

If you are looking for more up to date packages I would recommend using FlatPaks or AppImages since they are usually maintained by the devs and kept up to date.

I agree, however if the price is making your nervous try a Factory Seconds Framework. We noticed no issues with on our end and it’s cheaper.

Sure you get a 11th gen Intel, but the performance is still good enough for indi games and more than enough for surfing the web

So I have a Framework 13 AMD with Mint. Framework on older firmware isn’t the best, but with Mint 22 and by extension 24.04 it’s fine.

Got mine back in December and had no issues with the installation process. Games play fine though the fan goes to 100% after a bit. But with power profile in 22.1 it can quiet the machine down.

Other than that and the occasional hiccup. Compared to other laptops it’s the best machine I’ve used. So far no issues with only a few times of opening the terminal to fix minor issues.

Trying to avoid apps with subscriptions. The way I see it, it’s a question of when not if they change how the app works.

I 100% agree, and have Fusion360 in my VM. But there is a method to FreeCAD’s madness and once you get it, FreeCAD begins to make sense.

I found it hard to go back to fusion especially with the amount of control I had with my designs.

Also FreeCAD V1 is out, and it’s a marked improvement over their previous releases. Might be worth a try.

Being able to sync music or movies to my iPhone/iPad. More of an Apple issue than Linux, yet Mac/PC is compatible.

VLC does work, but since it’s not how Apple wants you to use your device it’s not as convincing nor flushed out.

It does but from my testing only on impossible shapes. Like two triangles mirrored at the tip with a width of 0.

It has other issues still, but the app is stable.

Is it decent ? Yes

Should I look elsewhere? Also yes.

CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.

I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.

My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.

That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.

Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/

The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8

There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

The remote is IR, so it’s facing up so the receiver can see it. That said I don’t think it’ll work when the bag is full. It’s in the front pocket for easy access.