FWIW I’ve got the wife happily running Debian + KDE on her (formerly win10) laptop and she absolutely loves it. I just helped her upgrade from bookworm 12 to trixie 13 and all went smoothly, solidifying her approval.

I intend to get a Fairphone 5 or 6 and test-drive Ubuntu Touch on it, hoping to daily drive it… but it’s all theoretical at this point. If I can’t get a real Linux distro to do everything I want reliably, Lineage OS is my fallback plan. I believe in the Fairphone mission, so that’ll be my next hardware purchase either way

No thanks; I’ll stick with LibreOffice.

(sorry, I just couldn’t resist…)

I’ve had no luck trying to get any semi-modern version FileMaker to run in WINE so far. I too came across that same win-apps solution recently. It looks promising, but I haven’t had a chance to build the underlying vm yet. Please dm me if you learn anything useful!

I rarely if ever see ZeroTier mentioned as a solution, but it’s a self-hostable encrypted virtual mesh network (with a small free tier for corp-hosted), super secure, and really easy to setup. I use ZTnet instead of the free-tier corp-hosted controller

AfterDark was awesome

Something cool & useful? htop. Something cool but useless? cmatrix

There are also various text-based screensavers like the windows pipes and such, but I don’t have those project names handy.

Nice! DeskFlow seems like exactly what I was looking for as my Barrier replacement. I have an annoyance with Wayland where it won’t remember my preference to allow mouse/kb sharing, but more importantly IT WORKS, and better yet it’s an active project still. THANK YOU!

I’ll check it out, thanks!

RustDesk on Wayland can’t run headless, which I need (unless they fixed already and I just haven’t noticed yet - I know they’ve been working on it!)

Yeah, Input-leap is the Barriers fork I was referring to. I need it to work on all platforms though, and I wasn’t able to get it working on macOS. I keep checking periodically tho (usually in response to posts like these - I wanna move Wayland like everyone else!)

RustDesk (remote desktop control) and Barriers (KVM-like server to control my laptop screen from my desktop just by moving mouse to that screen). Both of these are tightly integrated in my daily workflow and would be a hard loss.

There’s a modern fork of Barriers but I haven’t been able to get it working cross-platform yet. I know RustDesk is actively working to complete wayland support, but it’s not quite there yet.

She replied, “For the horde!”

I just rebuilt my wife’s old Dell laptop (AMD with a super generic Intel on-board GPU). It’s now running Debian stable + KDE and WoW installed easily under Lutris (start with their Battle.net wizard). Diablo III runs as well, but with some weird grphical glitches. Wife thinks they’re cool tho, so I stopped trying to fix it. Anyway, WoW seems playable enough for her, though super crowded towns like Orgramar (sp?) occassionally crash the game.

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Doesn’t this timeline inevitably lead to “YOU WILL BE UPGRADED OR YOU WILL BE DELETED” ?

I’ve heard Bazzite mentioned repeatedly as a popular distro for Linux gaming (and I plan to test drive it on my old laptop soneday when I get around to it). My understanding is that it’s a standalone distro you can run locally, same as Debian/Arch/Ubuntu/etc. I suspect the “cloud native” marketing term in this context just means you can run the same image file in a vm, vps, bare metal, whatever.

If I’m dead wrong, hopefully my reply will be sufficiently inflammatory to trigger a correction, lol.

Not your point, but I actually do recommend torrenting linux ISOs… often much faster than direct downloads from the devs’ websites. ;-)

I’m a huge fan of Ubiquiti APs, and run their Unifi controller on a Raspberry Pi. Sadly, their code is proprietary - but it basically just works.

Maybe see if ‘rclone mount’ solves the problem for ya. Rclone can often be a super handy swiss army knife for stuff like this.

Oh, Brother.

No seriously, buy Brother printers instead and avoid (at least some of) this enshitification.