conversely to this, im about to shut down our solaris unix boxes at work which makes me sad. cut my teeth programming perl on old unix boxes.

nearly everythings migrated, end of an era.

yay, windows.

I'm coming from a similar place. When I realised:

- I was building custom Windows installers to remove the growing list of OS features and changes I didn't want
- I was toying with running Windows Server as a workstation desktop environment
- Both options reliably caused some of the features I needed to fail
- 95% of what I was doing was available natively in Linux
- C# and .net are properly supported in Linux
- I have financial incentive and time to learn and customise the OS

It became a serious consideration.

Last night I managed to get Debian+Cinnamon stood up alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration with a dedicated drive per OS. This worked really well out of the box and grub managed to not f*** everything up for me this time.

The never-ending ideology wars between the FOSS devotees and closed source villains made this more painful than it needed to be, but I expected that. I got as far as Unity failing to work properly (a bug with the Unity Hub maybe) before I gave up for the night.

Aside from the NVIDIA situation hardware support seems pretty good this time around. I expected trouble that didn't emerge with my 10G NIC, sound gear etc.

I'll have to keep bashing away at Unity and may need to call in support from (ugh) the vendor. If I can't get the engine rolling I'm tied to the MS stack for rather a while.

"Well, I'm back", he said, tossing his bags through the Windows, back into his comfortable space.

"Looks like that's it for another few years."

I had a surprisingly steep hill when it comes to graphics driver support straight out of the gate. I run a 4k monitor and 2x 1440p side panels in portrait, all at 144hz and the experience was never great for me. For example, 1080p youtube videos when scaled up stuttered despite youtube's stats for nerds claiming good frame delivery.

I gather that x11 is really old and that the heir (Wayland) is new and poorly supported. I understand why its janky as f*** for my use case but a true desktop Operating System needs to manage my core devices properly. Having to navigate repos as you say feels dodgy as s***. Linux is where package management originated, it feels super weird that chocolatey on Windows feels like a better implementation.

There were also little things that annoyed, like the lack of universal clipboard hot keys. Aside from stubbornness, why are we still fighting against CTRL+C, +X, +V? Why not have a system-wide setting instead of every app rolls its own? Meanwhile support for modern 'innovation' like window snapping and system-wide dark mode is noticeably behind the curve in most des I used. I quite liked Pop's grid layout, but its fluid layout option was still simplistic.

I straight skipped a Mint attempt because its de is Cinnamon, and the devs there have said that they are way behind on any port efforts to Wayland. As far as I could see Mint would be very close to Debian+Cinnamon which was my first attempt. Pop was close but I still struggled to get Wayland up.

The final straw was when I finally got Unity installed and open in Pop!_OS by creating a new empty project ... and it ran like complete dogs***. Brand new project with no code spat errors to the console and the scene view was sluggish just rendering the basic, empty project!

No doubt everything I experienced has a history and a valid reason, but I'm not giving another night to this side quest. If it takes more than three concerted efforts to get a stable, smooth, usable desktop experience then I'm not ready for what the Linux world has to offer yet. The desktop barely functions for me at a basic level and I haven't even looked at IDEs and source control yet. Maybe if I wasn't working on 3D stuff and could put up with the de being a bit stuttery, I'm sure its probably fine at 1440p-60hz and below.

I will look into reducing my licensing because I no doubt send Redmond too much money, but looks like Windows is still where I will be for now. I plan to publish native to linux so will keep a distro handy for testing but looks like I'll be back for the 9th round someday.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-7/ <-- dot net becoming a first class citizen on Linux (in Ubuntu, anyway, but still cool)

Redhat's Fedora Silverblue is a good distribution as far as having continually updated apps as well as Redhat robustness.

If you like a good looking minimalist design, Garuda Linux is one to have a look at too.

there's literally nothing similar in terms of the embedded functionality of ChromeOS or Fuscia that Google make for laptops for the former and Google Home devices for the latter.

Google only offer API's for programming on either here and there are no rootkits or images that can be downloaded to install these ecosystems on anything BYOD

They only released Flex somewhat recently, poor trillion is a bit out of date.

FWIW my experiences with Flex have been poor. I actually tried to install it again on an old Dell Insprion and it simply failed to install - errors about it not finding a hard drive to install on & that I should check and make sure the machine has a hard disk installed (helpful).

I think it is really, really dependent on installing on certified hardware & anything else either requires a lot of mucking around or is a total dice roll.

It had been almost 20 years since I utilised a Linux variant as a desktop OS in seriousness; Knoppix Live-CD installed to a hard drive.

I wanted to run a sandboxed environment inside a VM on my work machine, with it talking directly out of the physical NIC rather than have anything in between (vpn etc). So I went on Distrowatch to see what was the preferred flavour of Linux these days - I never liked Ubuntu, and I could never quantify why, but I know I liked the Debian branch for no other reason than that's what i've been used to with Knoppix and Rasbian/RaspberryPi OS. Top popularity was 'MX Linux' - and so far i've been running that for almost 2 years as a browser fully fledged OS inside a VM sandbox. Works well, I do really like the built-in software installer. Some of the linux clones of things are really nice, better than winbloat.

last edited by hardware at 22:36:29 02/Dec/22