PROTO N MAN

the simplest answer would be: just try them all by yourself and see which one fits. Try only the popular ones btw, otherwise you’d have a hard time finding supports.

Word of advice: dont mind the aesthetics, but pay attention to stuff like package managers / packages and community. Here is what I meant:

• Unless you have special flavor from a distro like XFCE from Manjaro, any Linux distro can be made pretty. I can have Debian 12 on one computer and something like Arch on another, and I can still make both look exactly the same. So dont choose a distro just because it looks pretty, you can do that with any of them.

• Packages and package managers are so important, those are how you get software on Linux. Debian has a lot of softwares in its repos. Arch’s main repos do not have as much, but its AUR repos allow a lot of softwares to be installed.

Do you like apt, the manager for Ubuntu/Debian? Or do you prefer dnf, the manager for Fedora and RHEL? Package managers are more of a style really. I like Fedora’s dnf but Arch’s pacman is way faster.

• Community is also important. You dont want to pick a distro where only a handful of ppl use it. It would be very difficult to get supports. Ubuntu / Mint / Debians are so popular that you can get answers from any forum.

Good ! Good !

I see I have inspired an apprentice: https://lemmy.world/comment/15349991

The only thing missing now is to ditch the desktop environment and run EXWM. Or just run emacs from tty.

oh LibreOffice works great for me in general. Only for some documents with macros that were created in MS Office, I have problems running them. Eg: I once received a MS Word document that has some preprogrammed drop down list - so you click to extend the list and choose your items. The document opens fine, but I couldnt get the drop down feature to work. For Excel, documents with lots of VBA codes, I need to go in and do some manual changes.

In general, for 99% of the tasks, LibreOffice is fine. But it is that 1% which makes me still open up my Windows VM for MS Office.

After their shenanigan with subscription only models, we still see MS Office being used a lot. It shows how strong MS grips on the Office area is.

You are correct that 365 is used for most people. I used to use it too…For me, I prefer to be able to access stuff whenever I want. I live in an area with very shitty internet (both Wifi and 4G). Once, a client and I had to wait 5 minutes because Office Online takes too long to load up a spreadsheet. Offline for me is just a peace of mind.

LibreOffice better step up their games and make their office suites better. Outside of very niche and specialized applications like CAD or video editor, the average Joe will just need a good office suite to do stuff.

What do you backup with dejadup? Everything under /home?

yeh if I encrypt /home using luks with passphrase, so cryptsetup. How do I tell the OS to decrypt it? I tried passphrase before and it cannot boot because /home cannot be mounted. That is why I searched and found out about the Arch wiki way: using keyfile stored in root.

try Vivaldi.

the GNU pass encrypt using gpg? How do you transfer between devices, using cloud?

funny how with sooooo many updates, Windows are still very vulnerable. You buy a Windows PC, you better equip Antivirus software too; it is like bread and butter. On Linux and also Mac, you never need to worry about these things.

I use vi from an Emacs Shell, which was spawned from an Emacs GUI.

IMO:

• want to show off? i3wm with gaps and rofi for menu launcher. Add it some transparency effects too.

• want the MacOS style? Gnome. Default on a lot of distros.

• want something stable? XFCE. Install and forget.