This brought to mind a collection of asshole admin stories from the early internet. With a bit of googling, it was The Bastard Operator From Hell. God, I haven’t thought of those since the 90s. I can’t believe I could even recall something like that.
Anyway, fuck users.
Depends wholly on the situation. Right now, I needed Windows for a piece of hardware with no Linux support, so I installed Windows and just steamrolled my earlier openSUSE Leap installation. I will now dual boot with Debian for a while until I no longer need Windows.
When switching distros, you can usually copy your config files over. Or you can have a separate /home partition that doesn’t get wiped. This can cause issues though, due to version and structural differences between distros.
Personally, I only save what I absolutely need, like say browser bookmarks, and prefer to just get a fresh start. So, I just wipe everything. How you want to go about it is up to what you feel comfortable with, however. There’s rarely any one true way to do things in Linux. Free as in Freedom.
Always remember to backup any data before switching distros though. Always.
Oh yeah, gonna slap that bad boy on my laptop soon.
No, no, I’m sure that if we just deregulate harder the invisible hand of the free market will take care of it. Any day now.
openSUSE and Fedora with Plasma will be fine choices for you, based your post. Tumbleweed will take a bit more work, but usually it’s nothing too difficult. You can also go with Leap, which generally won’t have the same issues Tumbleweed has. I personally use Tumbleweed and like it a lot.
Fedora is just an all around solid distro, endorsed by Linus Torvalds himself! In my opinion, since you already have some experience with it, stick with Fedora. It’ll be fine.
My choice of distro is just a compromise and close enough to serving my needs. All distros have pros and cons, and I use different distros for different use cases.
Gentoo is great. I used it for a few years 20 years ago and I still think the package manager is the best I’ve ever used. I wouldn’t use Gentoo today, but I’m really glad I went through the install and maintenance process. It didn’t make me a guru, but I did learn a thing or two about Linux.
Mandriva is gone, but there’s a couple of projects carrying its legacy. OpenMandriva is one of them, obviously. Mandrake was my first distro too, so I have a soft spot for it.
From my perspective, OpenMandriva’s biggest strengths are that it’s independent, non-derivative, community driven, and based in Europe. Unfortunately it’s also small, but the people behind it seemingly do a lot with very little, so the community is passionate about the project.
Personally I’m just happy that there are smaller, non-corporate distros still out there providing alternatives. And OMLx seems like a pretty solid distro at that.
For their selling pitch, you can check their FAQ.
I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.
I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.
I agree. From the article:
“If we can make a really fair deal and a good deal for the United States, not a good deal for others, this is America first. It’s now America first.”
This is such an insane thing to say and it reveals a lot. Why on earth would anyone enter in to a trade deal, or even negotiations, if the other party only accepts one sided benefits? Any sane actor not under duress will reject any such notions out of hand. A good trade deal benefits both sides. This should be elementary.
Now, I’m no professional, but it looks to me that none of this is about the best interests of the USA or it’s citizens; this is all to serve one man’s ego. Trump’s thinking is so disordered he views any concessions as a narcissistic injury. Anything but complete domination is out of question, since it breaks his carefully cultivated sense of omnipotence, of being the biggest and strongest man in the room. His ego is so fragile it cannot sustain the slightest challenge to the false self. All of this, the trade wars, even becoming the POTUS, it’s all about one thing: trying to silence that nagging voice that tells him he’s worthless. Nothing will ever be enough to quell that inner critic, which is why he always escalates.
There is no room for any deals with this guy and his sycophants. They will just demand more.
And what guarantees does Europe have he won’t just flip the deal on a whim? This guy and these tactics deserve no quarter.
I landed on Claws Mail myself. It does look a bit dated, but the UI is functional and the client works. I’m content with it.
Unironically, this is why RMS was radicalized.
I will always have a soft spot for Birmingham for giving us Black Sabbath. Luckily, I have never been there though, so the reality will not ruin it for me.
I had a good, deep, cathartic laugh at this I didn’t realize I was in need of. UK politics has been an interesting but unfun mess for a long while.
Librewolf, which is great, but I have been desperate for alternatives for a long time now. I also use Falkon and Gnome Web on the side and those are ok, but unfortunately not on the level of Firefox and its ilk. I’ve been considering Waterfox and GNU IceCat also, but honestly the overall situation is depressing. Currently, Librewolf ticks most of my boxes, but every browser has some issue or another that I’m not keen on. I have no idea what the next step is.
Distros packaging software means that it is available to install with the package manager from their repositories. No distro provides every piece of software out there. This can be mitigated with Flatpak, Snap, GUIX, AppImage or, in a pinch, by compiling the required program yourself.
Sounds like you’ve already done most of the work. From what you’ve said, Fedora with Plasma sounds great for your use case. Good luck on your journey and glad to have you aboard!
With low specs like that, the experience will never be great, but with a very light desktop you can make it work. Debian is fine, but with some set up, Alpine could be one option. It’s a really light distro.
I’d say it didn’t fail. It was never really a consumer phone. It was an attempt to get hardware in the hands of developers, and it achieved that.
Other posts here discuss why it didn’t receive wider adoption.
I daily drove my PinePhone until I could no longer receive MMS messages, since my service provider has a different APN for the internet and MMS. That, and the modem became more unreliable over time. I like my PinePhone, but an average user would never adopt it as it is.