What initially started as a reply to this topic got quite long, so posting separately.
It’s nice that this topic has resurfaced at this time, as Windows has been frustrating me more and more as time passes. I’ve been using Debian as the under the hood server OS for my servers, as packages like OpenMediaVault run on Debian, and it is rock solid in my experience.
My main daily desktop computer runs Windows 10 still, and I consider Windows 11 unusable. For the past few months I have been taking incremental steps to try to get away from Windows as much as possible. I also have a Macbook Pro which is my “not at my desk” and “not at home” computer.
There’s a lot of engineering software that is Windows-only, and a bunch of other software that is Windows and Mac but no Linux support, which makes things a bit challenging.
I have some other computers of mine now running on Kubuntu - I really like KDE with Plasma, as this feels the most familiar to me as a long time Windows user, and it was suggested to me that Ubuntu base would have the widest range of supported applications.
It is rock solid on a 14 year old ThinkPad i420 which I got from a friend and swapped the HDD for an SSD (btw I love how easily repairable that thing is, 1 screw to get the bottom door open, another screw there and the keyboard pops out and I have full access to all RAM, wireless cards, etc…) That ThinkPad is playing 1080p videos over network on its 720p screen perfectly, as a test of sorts. I’m amazed and happy that 10+ year old computers, which I have quite a few of, still work so well.
I’m still open to other distros under the hood as long as I can put KDE/ Plasma on top of them, and maintenance is low effort/ things remain stable.
Anyways, I’m thinking about setting up more self-hosted services for myself, if I can get things like OnlyOffice Docs / NextCloud going, as well as Kasm (or similar) application containers for OS specific apps, all with a central network shared file location, then it really doesn’t matter what OS I’m running or what device I want to work on, I can just connect to the server and go to town.
This is a medium term goal of mine that I want to start looking at. It would also be cool to run slicer software out of a docker container as that would make it easy to keep a central set of projects and printer settings, instead of the -datadir approach with Prusa or Orca slicers. (I found docker instructions for Orca, while the Prusa docker project appears to be a few years stale.)
Thankfully, I am fully in KiCad now, which supports all OS including Linux.
I do need Fusion360 for work, and I did not succeed with the Wine attempt of running it back in the fall. I could use a Mac for this if I have to. I have a Mac Mini at my desk that I barely use, and there’s also a possibility where I switch over to it, although to be fair the desktop it would be competing with has 128gb of RAM and 2TB of SSD, and is running 4 x 1440p monitors.
I want to explore FreeCAD and see if I can make that the CAD software I use for my personal projects.
I do think it would be hilarious if I, as someone who does lots of technical and engineering work, became a majority of the time MacOS user …with the Linux servers providing the application infrastructure to work around Mac limitations, that is.
On a final note, the issues I’ve run into with Kubuntu so far are:
- On an identical copy of my powerful self built desktop, I have a Logitch MX Keys Keyboard and MX Master 3 mouse, each with a USB unifying receiver. If the computer goes to sleep of its own accord, I can press a key or jiggle the mouse and the computer will wake up, however then it does not receive input from any of those, ie: I cannot move my mouse cursor or type in my password, I have to hold the power button to force power off and then on a fresh power up things work again. This is a major issue as I cannot afford to lose work I have open constantly.
Iirc (and it has been a little while, so memory hazy), I think using the Sleep button in the OS forces a deeper sleep that requires the power button to wake up, and this seemed to avoid the no mouse/ keyboard input issue described above. - I just installed Kubuntu on XPS 15 7590 and there is quite a bit of online chatter about whether the Goodix fingerprint reader in it is supported in Linux. Someone has a a python script from 3 years ago which might work and they say it requires at least Python3.10, but the instructions with current Python3.12 fail and produce errors when trying to install the requirements. Fun times. I don’t know how to get around those issues.
- The ongoing conversations about Wayland vs not, and how even if it is better, that some/ many applications have not properly implemented support for it yet so things might not work as smoothly until everyone catches up?