Perhaps or perhaps not. Every new desk top was going to be better than Gnome when introduced. I remember having such high hopes for Elementary back in the day too. It was so elegant and smooth to use.

Only if it becomes the default install of the major distros. That, I think is a major hurdle, not even KDE has been able to leap that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that lumping in Android/ChromeOS to the broad term is a stat padding exercise. It makes the whole of Linux look like it’s the most used OS in the world. But I’m OK with if you want to do so.

Call it GNU/Linux or Linux I don’t care. I just refer to it as whatever distro I’ve hopped to for this month. So to me, right now I’m typing this on my laptop running Fedora 40 KDE and my mini-desktop is running Fedora 40 Atomic Budgie.

When the heat death of the universe arrives, the Sackcloth and Ashes that is Slack will be there to mark it’s passing.

Not even Debian will survive, but Slack will go on. Tar Balls Yum!

Perhaps it is a tragedy that we seem to have lost the GNU part. But in the end, the great unwashed masses get to decide what something is called.

Personally, I blame the Brits for this, (and NOT the French this time), because of their penchant for trying to chop every multi-syllable word down into as few as possible. See: Football vs Soccer silliness.

Only if you want enterprise solutions. RedHat does the same. So does Suse. A business should pay for enterprise level supports and solutions don’t you think?

It’s also called ‘the old free stuff’. If free matters that much, you could run Slack or better yet LFS.

Extended compliance support. Enterprise level needs require a lot of paperwork just to make sure you are in legal compliance with all rules and regulations. The paperwork alone can be a very heavy costly burden on the IT department.

Any distro wanting to be serious in the enterprise space needs to offer support for that. And businesses will pay for it because it’s cheaper than having a large staff only dedicated to it. It’s part of how Ubuntu can offer you the free stuff and remain a top used distro for the masses. RedHat does the same. RedHat just rebrands the free stuff as Fedora. At least Ubuntu doesn’t hide behind a different brand name when offering sercives they charge for.

From my look at it, Ubuntu is making it clear that they guarantee support for 10 years, rather than just the standard 4 of LTS releases. And they are also guaranteeing compliance for enterprise uses, saving the paperwork load and time. This could make Ubuntu Pro attractive for enterprises and the IT department. Everyone wants to limit the paperwork checks. Us plebes, can make do with the free standard 4 years of LTS support if that’s what you want.

I’m quite sure that any distro that offers enterprise solutions is doing similar things just for the money. RedHat does it for sure. But us plebes don’t ever see it because we use Fedora instead.

If Fedora plays nice this time around, I’m seriously considering Kinninte and Atomic Budgie for 41. (But Fedora always ends badly for me)

Oh god, me too. It’s a Pavlovian response!

Yeah, I’m using Fedora KDE and Budgie on a laptop and mini-desktop. There were a boatload of updates over the weekend. I understand the safety of doing a reboot to be up to date, but it does give me flashbacks to Wondows.

But, you can use sudo dnf upgrade and only need to reboot when you want to. Updating through Discover tends to make you reboot a lot.

Well, threads are actually quite easy to create in FreeCAD these days. Unless you need some kind of specialty thread, like say a light bulb thread or British ME, (Model Engineer), thread.

The Hole tool is merely point and select the thread you want - your choice of modeled or not. Plus you can do countersinks and counterbores from the same tool. The Thread Profile workbench makes external and internal threads fast and easy. Make your choice of thread - vee, buttress, or ACME/Trapazoidal and three clicks later you got a thread. The Fasteners workbench will also let you create threads easily too. Gears and springs have become simple to make with no real modeling required anymore. I’ve been trying out the Sheet metal workbench lately also. Not very full featured yet, but it does the basics pretty well so far. So lots of quality of life improvements have been making their way into FreeCAD since 0.17.

Where FreeCAD fails, (beside the TPN issue), is in the somewhat slower basic work flow. But, with customization, it can get pretty close to being fairly fast. But most users are casual users and don’t dig into settings very much. But the biggest issue is the lack of a decent single robust and integrated Assembly workbench. I can design parts all day long, but unless I can easily put them all together to see if and how they all work together, it makes FreeCAD a no-go for commercial work. I can’t even really design a model steam engine and assemble all the parts very easily.

Now, Ondsell is working on a unifying assembly workbench that I have very high hopes for, but it’s not there yet. They do have a ways to go still.

As a user of FreeCAD and someone who made a living using CAD software, FreeCAD ain’t it for the ‘real world’ yet. But I do have hopes that someday it might be.

I would do it for the reaction. I doubt they would complain very much at all.

OnlyOffice is pretty nice for homegamers I think. I just don’t need or want a full up heavyweight office suite anymore. And I’ve gotten to the point where I remove LibreOffice and replace it with OnlyOffice every time.

So do it, just do it. You know you want to…

Nice! Your parents are willing to expand their horizons and don’t fear the unknown in search of something better. This old Grandpa prefers running a good distro myself.

Most people are simple users, they have little interest in setting up mail servers or websites. They just want to use a computer, not work a computer. And those are the people you need to convince into giving a Linux distro or three a try - Mom and Dad, your little Brother, Auntie Sue, and Grandpa and Grandma.

Fortunately, you can easily get a mini desktop computer from Amazon on the cheap, I picked one up for $90US last summer purely for distro hopping, and then install a distro to see if you like it or not. It’s cheap and easy. Toss in a $20US wireless keyboard and mouse combo set, and an old unused monitor, and for less than a Saturday night out, you got a rig to surf Linux distros to your heart’s content to see the power of the Linux desktop.

In fact it’s my belief it’s these dirt cheap modestly spec’ed mini computers that should come with a Linux distro pre-installed. And not the $1000US+ laptops that Linux is currently available on from the factory. Much like Chromebooks, these cheap little computers could and should be the gateway to increased adoption of Linux for the home users.

Where I live even 4G isn’t all that reliable. Making a phone call is mostly impossible and a text message is hit or miss unless I’m in a town or along a major road, This is due to terrain and the general lack of towers. 4G is spotty at best and with many areas having no service at all. And I ain’t never going to live long enough to ever see 5G out here.

But, I would agree that while 32KB is pretty minor for an internet connection, things have a way of stacking. 32KB here, another extra 32KB there and pretty soon things can get ‘heavy’ to use.

There is a lot of merit in reading man pages - as long as you understand what they are talking about. Something most newcomers lack. I’ve read more than one man page that was so poorly written that unless you were a top developer, I was worse off than before I started.

Technical writing is an art form and very few in the FOSS world, (and even the rest of the world), are really good at it. It always pays to be mindful of just how unskilled your audience is.