Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable. Your skill level is good so you can go with Debian 12, I am loving it after 6 years of Ubuntu LTS. Performance, stability and hardware support is amazing, as is battery. GNOME is the best DE on laptops if you use scaling factor in GNOME Tweaks.
If your only need is MS Office, you can get away with MS Office 2007 in a Windows XP VM in VirtualBox. Otherwise, buy a M.2 NGFF SSD (check PSREF spec sheet file for your ThinkPad) for Windows 10 (preferably Ameliorated Project).
You will almost certainly be able to use KDE Connect under Xfce. However, some dependencies will most likely be installed during the installation, which in turn have their own dependencies. With a bit of bad luck, you will install half of Plasma, so to speak.
I’ve had a pretty good time with PopOS. GNOME is a bit rough at times (handling window sizes, font size changes, monitor layout updates) and I only had DisplayLink driver issues, which is probably trivial for most personal users nowadays.
This looks really nice! However, as someone who uses a local Jellyfin server for my music, I can’t really use it. I know on the site it’s mentioned that this will never connect to the web, but it’d be nice to see it support local servers of common self-hosted music library solutions (Jellyfin, plex, ampache). Right now the only real solution for these on Linux is Sonixd, so an alternative would be sweet.
Thanks! Honestly, that’s really out of scope for this project. Maybe you could mount the folder with your music locally, although I can already tell you it’s gonna be pretty slow if you have a medium/large music library.
Have you looked into Plex Amp? I’ve been told it’s decent.
I used this Photoshop CC installer a couple months ago for v21.2.4 and it got Photoshop installed & running but I personally experienced a lot of bugginess with the UI.
Could be because I’m on Wayland, hadn’t tried it on X11 myself. Seems like it worked decently for some other users.
Aside from that installer, though, modern Adobe products tend to be a huge pain to even get running. If Linux alternatives don’t cut it for your use case then you might just have to dualboot Windows for those apps to have them fully usable unfortunately.
The only real “problem” would be the lack of certifications, which are quite hard to get.
Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) are normally used for these tasks, but, AFAIK there are already projects using linux with patches to make it run a RTOS kernel.
In my opinion, I think it all depends on what part of the plane it is running. If it is a core sensor, providing real time data, it makes a lot of sense to use a RTOS. It needs to prove it can run its tasks on time, and the scheduler needs to be understandable. There’s also a lot of overhead with running a full OS with processes, which don’t make sense for a sensor which only function is to provide data over a CAN/LIN bus.
But, for other things, like dashboard visualizations, music for the aircraft, entertainment, and those non-critical-realtime needs, then it makes a lot of sense to run linux. After all, you’d get access to a lot of already built software and a working dev environment.
And don’t get me wrong, this is clearly BS from boeing to keep selling their closed source software. There are already open source RTOS systems, like FreeRTOS. I do not mean to keep those real time systems closed, but to use a full OS where it makes sense and a RTOS where that makes more sense. Both open source!
That makes sense, and yeah I imagine the problem isn’t the entertainment system.
I just don’t get the the last paragraph. I don’t know if using Linux affects their code being OS or not. If they’re just running it on top of Linux and not modifying it, it probably won’t be a GPL violation to keep it closed.
Boeing has their own RTOS, which they might be using on more than “real time critical” software. What I mean is: embrace open source, be it Linux or some other OS more specific for that task, but open source all the things!
I remember there were talks about merging the patches and making it an option when building. I don’t know the current status of that.
On real time operating systems, like freertos, not only the kernel is real time but everything else is too. Like: you can guarantee your call on the I2C and SPI won’t take more than 5ms, for example, even with hardware issues. The whole environment is built around the hardware realtime concept.
I have a cheap Acer laptop with AMD and it works great. I’m dual booting with Windows. I do remember having to struggle with the install though. I had to turn off secure boot and can’t remember what else. Good luck.
In my experience, Acer build quality has been shoddy. There’s a reason everyone recommends used Thinkpads. They have great build quality so you can get more years out of a used one than a new cheap consumer laptop.
Well, NASA trusts Linux enough to send it to Mars. They build rockets, so it should be good enough for flying busses. Unless you don’t trust your software engineers, but then having them build a custom microkernel OS instead sounds not much better.
Every NASA crewed launch to ISS from US soil is on a stack that uses Linux for avionics: Falcon 9 and Dragon 2. The Starlink constellation is also a massive deployment of Linux nodes in space.
The backup NASA commercial crew system from the 737 Max people hasn’t flown people yet and probably won’t this year, perhaps never. They somehow managed to have two critical software failures on their first orbital flight test, either of which would have caused loss of vehicle without intervention. Both should have been caught with comprehensive testing.
Nix OS, Guix or Vanilla OS for sandboxing I guess. But basically everything but Ubuntu is pretty good for privacy, it’s a big part of free software philosophy.
I mean, neither Microsoft nor Apple were stupid enough to sell user data to Amazon. I’d love to see how the Linux community would’ve responded to that, because I doubt they’d have the same “oh but it’s opt in now, so it’s ok” reaction.
My understanding is that it’s not really the disrto, but the software running on it that’d effect battery life and performance. Both Debian and Arch can come pretty bare bones on a blank install (Ubuntu and derivatives tend to come with a fair bit of stuff bundled out of the box).
I’d personally reccomend trying a Debian installation (I’d likely say use stable, but testing or sid are also options if you need quicker updates and don’t care for flatpak/snap/appimage/distrobox). The installer plays nice with Windows, and you can skip installing a desktop during installation then CLI install a tiling window manager to really minimize ‘bloat’.
I like the design and it looks perfect for me since I store everything locally and tag manually. My only issue is it only “sees” around 600 songs out of the 30 ˙000 I have, leaving some albums with only 1 song and ignoring a lot of artists. Is there a way to force it to notice the rest? Everything is in the same folder
Ah that’s strange, they should be picked up as long as they are in the music folder. Do you mind sharing the format of one of the songs that isn’t recognized?
If you have time, could you open the app from the terminal (flatpak run io.github.mmarco94.tambourine) and see if any interesting log pops up?
Ooh I see now! I should have thought of it, most of my songs are in opus format, and tambourine is only picking up the flacs:
023-07-04 11:00:57.342 | ERROR | io.github.mmarco94.tambourine.data.Library | Error while parsing music file: No Reader associated with this extension:opus
My bad, many music apps don’t support opus. I have everything in flac on a separate drive, but there’s no room on my laptop so I convert them. Opus is open source and compresses files in a much more optimised way than mp3, so you can get smaller files with way better sound quality.
I have no idea how much work adding support for it would entail, but I would definitely use tambourine if you decided to do it. Right now I’m using Elisa on KDE, which is nice but very slow to recreate its database every time I add or change something.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.