When/why did you start using Linux and whats your setup?

Tech Talk Linux and FOSS
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But it will take a long time for that to happen. The current cloud apps for Office 365 are a mere shadow of the local apps and a lot of them are missing (Access, Publisher, Project, Visio etc.).

Also, we have Office 365, but we can’t store files in the Microsoft cloud (company and regulatory reasons), therefore the cloud apps are a non-starter, as they can’t work with local files, which is still a requirement in some countries and industries.

Also, a lot of corporate software integrates directly into MS Office. Our telephone system links directly into Outlook and you can see who is telephoning from within Outlook and directly dial the phone from a contact. Our DMS is tightly linked to office, you can book files in and out of the DMS directly from within Office programs. Our ERP software generates reports directly in Excel.

That is the area where the cloud versions just can’t compete at the moment. Add into that the missing features and lack of macros on the cloud versions and they have a very long way to go.

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I agree it will take time, but I feel that Microsoft may be looking to make the online version of Office universal at some point in the future.

As an experiment, I took the smallest and weakest PC that I have that’s capable of running a current Linux distro: an Asus EEE PC with an Atom N270 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of memory, running the 32-bit version of Linux Lite. Using Firefox, I logged on to my Office account which showed me my OneDrive folders, then opened a 63-page 11,000-word document with table-formatted pages containing embedded lists and some other fairly quirky formatting.

It was slow to display the content and refresh between pages, but not unusably slow, and every single page was displayed exactly the same as in the desktop environment in which the document was created (although it did need changing to full screen display [F11] to make the best use of the tiny 7 inch screen).

Such a feeble PC wouldn’t be suitable for daily use, but if I ever get back to travelling again, I’d certainly consider adding it to my bag if weekending with friends, in case of an emergency request to review and comment a document. The limited number of Office apps currently available online would be sufficient for that one use case, for me.

So while I would agree that Office Online is still far from ready for the sort of business environment you describe, I think it’s heading in the right direction, and already better at handling complex documents than when I’ve tested things with Libre Office or Open Office, both of which mangle the sort of documents I work on. The test will be if Microsoft are prepared to put the money into bringing all of their Office programs into the online environment and making them capable of meeting secure business operating requirements.

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My first Linux was Slackware - a bunch of floppies and a busted install. I could never get XFree86 to configure. This would have been some time in the mid-90s. It was before TechTV so likely '95-97. I gave up. I just didn’t see the need.

Linux didn’t become usable for me until Mandrake came out - KDE running on a lightly modified Red Hat. That was the first Linux we installed and recommended on The Screen Savers. This would have been in 1998 because I remember Kate was still hosting. I think it was the first (and probably only) live Linux install on national television. I fell in love instantly. With Linux. Well and with Kate, too.

I stuck with Mandrake for a long time. Dabbling in Red Hat, Suse, and eventually Ubuntu. But I had an instinctive disregard for the more commercial releases, though, and eventually settled on Ubuntu’s father, Debian for most of my installs.

These days I run Linux and macOS almost exclusively, and pretty much equally. I loved and recommended the Antergos flavor of Arch for some time - I prefer rolling distros for desktop, Debian stable for servers - but these days Manjaro has my heart. I have installed Arch, just to prove I could do it, but Manjaro offers most of the benefits of Arch (including pacman and the AUR) without the pain.

I used KDE in the early days, but Gnome 3 has my heart these days. And of course I always have a terminal with tmux open. My preferred Linux laptops are Lenovo Thinkpads, but the current Dell XPS 13 is very sweet running Manjaro, and I have several System76 machines running their Pop_OS.

As for the future, I’m looking forward to leaving the godawful x86 architecture in the dust. I’m excited about Apple Silicon and so glad I’ll still be able to run ARM Linux on the new Macs. The future of computing is very bright with Linux and macOS marching into the sunrise arm in ARM!

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Leo, Thanks for sharing this! I almost exclusively run Linux and Mac as well. I’m really new to Mac and was surprised to learn how similar Mac is to Linux , It makes sense since it’s based on Unix. I also want to thank you for the new Show “Hands on Mac” . I hope “Hands on Linux” becomes a thing soon. It would be great for new comers to Linux. Keep up the great work~ and thanks for giving us something to focus on besides this dystopian world.

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I’ve always found Linux to be a confusing operating system that the makers didn’t put much work into to make user-friendly, though I might be wrong. I’ve only ever used Linux with the beta for Chromebook on installing a few apps.

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Slackware was my first Linux OS as well - 30+ floppy disks and an interminably long install process, but at least it worked well on the hardware I tried it with. Mandrake and many others were tried - Tails, Tinycore, Berry, AntiX, Puppy, Legacy, Debian, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, PC Linux, SliTaz, Zeven, Bodhi, Ylmf, Feather, Mint, Slax, Browser Linux, even Kali for some security tools. Oh, and SUSE Desktop - remember that attempt to make an all-in-one package to rival Windows on the desktop?

Yet despite all that, and a period doing admin and tech support for my employer’s mainframe POSIX-compliant OS, I kept on ending up back with Windows. It seems to be my comfort zone for some reason. Even a spell of work where I was given a Macbook by another employer didn’t change things.

That said, I’m very aware that MS could screw up the usability of Windows for my purposes at any moment, given their propensity for ill-considered and badly-executed changes of direction. Vista and 8 spring to mind particularly for their awfulness.

Given that I am able to spin up a copy of every version of Windows since 3.11 if required, my only concern is having something viable for Internet-connected work if something happens to Windows that would drive me away.

Chromebooks are nice, but still too limited for all my needs at present. Mac OS would be an option if I still need my current requirement of full support for Office, but my long-stop is Linux Lite. I first installed the 32-bit version on some PCs that weren’t viable for Windows 10 (like the EEE PC I mentioned earlier) but found it very usable for someone conditioned to the Windows visual layout. It too is a distro with rolling updates, and I like the way it defaults to prompting a check for updates every time it starts. The support forum was pretty decent last time I looked as well. If I had to suddenly move away from Windows, the 64-bit version of Linux Lite would be my most likely choice for all-round usability with a minimal learning curve.

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So many flavors of Linux. I’m sure you’ll like a few of them. check this web page out for more info. https://distrowatch.com/

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:hamburger:
That mean’s food, right? That website was interesting, thanks.

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Flavors is a metaphor in this context, meaning “type of Linux” :wink:

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I know, I know. I’m just really hungry right now. :hamburger:

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I believe it was Mandrake back in the late 90s. I have tried many distributions ever since but Linux has never been able to grow on me as a desktop system. And actually, neither have I ever used it successfully as a core network device. I once tried to implement a firewall on it and was quickly discouraged by how much time I would’ve needed to tailor it to my needs and remove all the unnecessary stuff from it. OpenBSD 2.9 became my system of choice for all network services that day, and it’s stayed that way.

I would always say Debian if I had to use it. But never as a daily desktop machine. It’s way too unpolished for me and cumbersome to use. It’s fun to play with, the kernel is quite nice, you’ve got all that tweaks, just, I don’t need them. And as far as software goes, I guess I’m too old to be constantly looking for alternatives to the mainstream products and deal with them being often inferior.

But, it’s just me. It’s probably also my expectations as well. I’ve always seen Linux and Unix as systems that are slim, light, and doing exactly what I need them to do, and nothing more.

I always say, use the right tools for the right tasks. macOS has been my personal driver, and Windows is what I use for work. Maybe all Linux needs is someone to take the kernel and build an OS upon it. Just like Apple did with Darwin. Who knows, maybe it’s Microsoft. They’ve been teasing lately… I would love to see the result.

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My first linux was SLS. I keep thinking that the kernel was 0.86, but looking at the kernel history, it must have been 0.96. I remember it took a looooong time to get to 1.0. (or in the parlance of the time 1.0 will be here real soon now). I was running on a 386sx with 1MB (that’s right MB). I did get XFree to run after adding a bunch of swap space. The shop I was working at ran our product on Sun Sparcstations and I was able to get my XServer on my crappy 386 to bring up OpenWindows from one of the sparcstations but it was so slow you could watch the window frames paint. I did use it as my daily workstation telnetting in to our various unix servers using multiple linux virtual consoles. It was so much better than the crappy dos telnet apps from PC/NFS or Beame & Whiteside.

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I first tried Mandrake Linux in 1998, using the boot CD on my old Gateway computer that ran win 95. Then i migrated to dual booting a Compaq computer between win 98 and Fedora Linux. When I upgraded to a EL120 eMachine running windows Vista I configured it to dual boot with Ubuntu 8.04 initially. As I got more experience I started migrating my daily usage from Windows to Linux to include syncing my Palm devices and moving from Microsoft to GnuCash. I now run Ubuntu Studio 18.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 on a Lenova ThinkCentre-A63 that is configured to dual boot Win 10 for the rare occasions that I need Windows (downloading my ebooks since WINE supported versions of ADE, NOOK for PC and Kindle PC don’t anymore) or access to my old palm devices. I was using my eMachine as a file server until I reconfigured my Lenova with a 500 gb SSD and 1 TB for storing all my files and setting it up so I can SSH from my chromebook to do my daily tasks from anywhere in my home.

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Working in the computer industry, I used Microsoft products since DOS in the 80’s. Over the years, I tried Linux on the desktop many times, always finding it lacking for use as an everyday desktop OS. It always lacked in applications, required cryptic command line care and feeding, and had a quite unfriendly and unhelpful community of users online.

Windows version 8 finally drove me away from Microsoft for good. At the time, I discovered that Linux on the desktop had matured to the point where it was very usable and an acceptable replacement for Windows. Left Windows for Ubuntu, and never went back.

Wine lets me run most apps that run on Windows but not on Linux. There are still a couple of apps that are not supported on Linux. Blue Iris (security cameras) and Quicken (personal finance) require me to keep an old Windows box running for very infrequent use. Other than that, my daily PC use is all Ubuntu. Libre Office, GIMP, Thunderbird, Newsblur, Gpodder and Plex and apps that I use every day. The rest is all browser based. I keep Ubuntu updated, waiting for a couple of years to move to the next long term release. (I’m almost ready to move on from Ubuntu 18.04). In many years, I’ve never had a Linux update cause problems and I’ve never had Linux crash. Never – amazing!

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I tried linux when I will still on Modem (Mid 90’s) in those days you could buy pressed CD’s from Walnut Creek :stuck_out_tongue: Slackware was the distro of choice, then I used to buy the Boxes of Mandrake Linux and Slackware Linux with 10 CD’s + DVD and huge manuals. Configuring XServer on a Compaq Presario was a nightmare, then you had dreaded softmodems of doom… those were the days.

Today I run a System 76 Lemur Pro and I dual boot PopOS for gaming (external thunderbolt GPU) + Arch with Awesome wm for coding (Lemur’s have x2 nvme slots)

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I made the move from Microsoft Money to the cross platform GnuCash and never regretted it. Its import options made moving easier.

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Not sure - SUSE Linux in 2003 or so… I remember RedHat was around and I played with both. I set up my intranet server on an old workstation, then it was pretty much set it and forget it. I modified the Intranet site with FrontPage maybe???

Haven’t had much calling for Linux in recent years in the roles I end up in. I do have one VM with Linux installed just in case I get bored, something to play with. :laughing:

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I started using Unix in college (Ultrix, Digital Unix) and only saw someone playing with Linux on a PC and thought “wow Unix on a PC, eh?”

I didn’t actually start using it on a PC until the live-CD era where Ubuntu would mail you a CD. I had many different Live-USB keys and Linux netbooks (remember EEE?) that I would cheat on XP with until I bought a barebones Foxconn Atom PC 10 years ago and installed Ubuntu 12. I upgraded 5 years later to a NUC and now I’m contemplating my next upgrade.

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I’ve dabbled in various distros over the years, I think my first one was probably Slackware (it may have even came in the book Linux for Dummies). I’ve primarily been involved in Windows based development for my IT career, so 99.5% of the time it is Windows environments at work (although lately we’re getting into AWS work, so I do a bit of
Linux on the server).

I haven’t really done anything serious with Linux at home, some Raspberry Pis and firing up a distro once in a while to check out the state of Linux. I liked Ubuntu a bit, Elementary OS was pretty nifty, but I settled on Mint (Cinnamon) a couple of years ago for my spare “experimental” laptop. I had not touched it in several months until @Leo was talking about Manjaro the other day. So, I pulled an old Lenovo ThinkPad T430s out of the closet and installed Manjaro (Gnome). It’s pretty nice so far, and great to see how far Linux on the desktop has come over the years.

The bonus is realizing how much I like these old ThinkPads. Great keyboards and built like a tank. :wink:

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I started using my Linux distro last year. As an IT consultant I had a couple clients who used this OS and asked if I knew how to work on it, and that got me curious. Then I began the dissertation part of my PhD journey and plan to focus on Open Source Software, so that pushed me over the edge. I figured if I’m going to write 100 pages about the topic I should have some experience.

Right now I have Linux Mint as the main OS, and I have Kali, and Ubuntu as virtual boxes as well.

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