Thanks, I do agree, I should have not told them that. And if I’d invest more time into theming, the attempt could be more successful.

Also, I partially replied to you both in this sibling comment of mine. But I’d partially repeat: I am able and willing to invest inadequate time into helping them adapt, but they react as ‘thanks, we’ll try it on our own and ask questions’ but the questions never followed. The only request was to return to their previous system.

I did it as I did it, only because I did it before the Christmas, but decided that there are holidays coming, and I’d swap the disks right after the holidays. And I did it after the Easter, which was a few weeks ago. If I’m to explore theming and KDE in more depths, it’s quite realistic I’d update their system by the next Christmas, if not later.

At the moment, I think of trying Windows 11 IoT LTSC with them, and see how it goes. And then attempt to swap it for something like Zorin or highly modified KDE. To my brief search, it looks like it’s just easier to find more modern themes than something old, like Windows 10 or 7. I found a nice clone of Windows 7, by the way, but it was unrealistic, they look a bit younger than the people who’d heavily use Windows 7 (as I did, before moving to macOS Mac OS X and Linux). I believe most folks don’t remember Windows 7, so if you theming, you’d rather theme for something more modern.

Thanks, I think I may try again some other time, when I’d explore theming. I have never tried (and needed) my system to look like Windows, as even when I used Windows itself, I was making it a mix of the best things from macOS and Linux. Here, I surely made a mistake of not hiding the attempt and showing them the modern Gnome, which is pretty simple for a newcomer. A non-techie friend installed Fedora Workstation (to be precise, Silverblue) once, and in general was very positive about his impressions.

Also, an interesting thing about tech support: I’m much more qualified with Linux than they are with Windows. And I’m able to help them adapt, by investing inadequate time (like an hour or two a day, if needed), asking nothing in return. Yet, people are not willing to try, perhaps they are afraid, or have some stereotypes of Linux maybe.

What if that’s they don’t care, as they’re the evil empire.

It reminded me that scene in Andor (2022) in the first season, episode 9, ‘nobody’s listening’ the protagonist says they’re not listening to prisoners as they don’t care, so much they don’t believe they can lose their domination. You have to be in the context of the show (which I highly recommend, if you like the Star Wars universe) to get the reference. But I think that could be the case here.

Microsoft may not care, not because they know something, but rather the opposite. Them being pedo oligarchs not really caring much. Perhaps they’re still into the illusion Linux is some very niche thing for dorks.

I have an interesting story about it (I’d write it in my blog, it’s somewhat long). If in a few words, at my kid’s school, they (a few teachers) have a very old PC that struggles with Windows (also, It’s HDD there), so I reinstalled Linux there. Prior, I asked what they use. ‘Not much really’ was the reply, and so I explored, and diagnosed it’s just browser (which was obsolete and couldn’t be updated), Word, and Explorer (files manager). Not much else.

Sure thing, Linux can do all of them many times better!

I picked Fedora Silverblue (that’s the atomic version with Gnome) thinking it’s so much better than the KDE version, as it’s simpler. It’s not more complex than Chrome OS. My mistake, even advertising it as a macOS (good, right?) clone did not help, they were terrified. The very next day I rebased it to KDE, and applied some Windows 11 theme. It was very similar in its looks. They said ‘OK, we’d try to use it’ but the very next day they asked me to bring their system back. (I never erased it, just swapped their HDD with my SSD.)

I gave up, perhaps quite quickly, but I have no resources to push them at the moment. For you to understand, their computer switched from being very noisy to being so silent I was asking (every day while it was with Linux, like 3 or 4 days in total) whether it’s on or not. Back to Windows, and it’s super noisy back again. The difference was night and day. Right now, the machine boots within like 5 minutes. A couple of minutes to desktop, and a few minutes for it to become usable. With the SSD and Linux, half a minute tops. And when it’s booted, it’s pretty much instant.

• browser is the same, but updated
• Word is Libre Office Writer, which is simpler. They don’t use it heavily, so it should work for them. I set it to save the files as docx. The icon is from MS Word.
• file manager is many times simpler visually, yet million times more advanced. A Linux user would surely know the difference, especially given Microslop did theirs in Electron, lol.

Yet, they were afraid of Linux. Perhaps, my mistake was stressing that. Maybe I should have Only Office installed (is it more alike? Haven’t used it for many years), and invest some time into tuning the theme to be identical, it had some minor difference. And tell them that’s Windows 11, and I just updated their system. I don’t know. Their concern was they didn’t know how to work with it, not even trying. I explicitly offered to babysit them for a few days, to help them adapt, but they refused.

Perhaps, I should have tried Zorin, if it’s more similar visually. But I have no experience of it, so I’m not sure.

Apart from that, I believe Linux is more than ready to be a desktop OS, it has everything needed, or almost everything. Only some software is lacking, I’d say.

Thanks for the suggestion of what the next steps might be! You’re right, I definitely want to go with Ansible next! Just did not have a chance to need any system for installing the system the way I need.

I knew that’s not optimal, to have it in a blog, but I also want to make a point a blog could be a notepad (that one of paper!), and it would be as easy still!

Sleeping is something I haven’t think of, but it’s a really great way of saving power! Thanks for your input, I’d definitely replicate your approach! (When it comes to scale a bit.)

Not sure that’s relevant, but I’m playing around with Linux on some obsolete Windows tablets with cheap eMMC disks (one of which is broken, so I replaced it with a no name microSD card, plus USB drive), and I format my disks to f2fs, which theoretically should help with both keeping the disks for longer, and accessing the data faster.

Being with Arch for like seven years or so, it’s only recently I’ve learned one neat trick, upon reinstalling the system I have on various Windows tablets. I start sshd, do passwd and connect from my main machine. Then I just quickly format disks, and pacstrap system by copy-pasting commands from my blog, where I have the instructions for my devices. It’s not the very techy way, I guess, but I was able to reinstall my system within like 10 minutes, most of which was booting off the USB drive with Arch ISO, and then downloading the packages and waiting for them to be installed, and rebuilding Initramfs.

Wow, I expected to see a life sentence. Six years is a joke, given the harm done.

Is it that high power server takes a few seconds to boot? What’s the hardware you have there? I’m curious that’s the average boot time for an average high power server? I do use heavily obsolete devices for my personal servers (think of DDR-2 era devices with Intel Atom or sometimes core 2 duo devices) usually without even SSDs. With an SSD, my desktop devices (all DDR-3 era with SATA-3 disks) boot within 20…30 seconds, which is good enough for me. I assume the more modern devices would be quicker, but [single-digit, I assume] seconds sounds very good. To me, that sounds like it’s a no-brainer to have this feature. I was thinking whether I can wait minutes for something I need occasionally to boot. Seconds is just too fast. I think that delay is tolerable even for a commercial / production server, where the expectations are just different.

Oh wow, that’s really cool! I do use Caddy too.

Is it that your service/website is on both (low powered server and high powered one) or is it only on the high powered? So, it’s like

• the lower powered server knows it needs help (sounds a bit surreal to me, but perhaps it’s doable)
• or the lower powered server does not serve anything, but wakes up the high powered when the thing is accessed?

I guess that’s the 2nd thing, but it’s very cool indeed! That way you can really have very convenient things for free, as it’s super cheap to run any hardware for a very while on demand. I don’t mind waiting a minute or even two when I need to access something very infrequently and don’t want to run my server 24/7. I do exactly that, but I wake up it via LAN manually.

Pimp it is then!

More likely your system is more sophisticated, I have just joined the hobby, so to say. But I am sure you can go much cheaper than that with bare metal. If I’d really need to host something, I’d rather buy a real server, and invest in solar power instead of paying some rent. Was a happy Digital Ocean customer, before I realised I can do the same with a Raspberry Pi. I was buying a couple of Pis a year for them. Right now, de-facto one Pi can host everything I really need. I regret I wasted about half a thousand on nothing. Could have bought a great NUC instead of wasting money on the cheapest VM for years.

I realised I don’t need my servers being online 24/7, so for me that’s Raspberry Pi and equivalents, plus powering on computers on demand.

I love how they censored the title on the orange site, to have no price in it.

Pedohitler is a nice word, gonna steal it.

The UI is the worst I’ve ever seen, but you can use PhotoGimp

Oh yeah, it does help indeed. After I got used to Gimp, I don’t think I’d ever want to open Photoshop. For my personal tasks that’s 100%.

Never even heard of the Figma mockups. Can you find the link please?

What do you mean? I have no idea what to search for. I’d appreciate some links, or some unfolded explanation. Can you patent features? Sounds a bit absurd.

Can I patent booting the OS from a USB drive? That’s a feature, isn’t it?

Well, I do understand the difference between the UI and UX, but I have no idea what they are implying. I asked that question precisely because I have no idea what to search for.

The difference between UI and UX is simple. The UI is just the interface: it’s how the app, service, anything, interacts with its user. The experience is … well, the experience of it. E.g. Gimp is awful at UI, but the UX is not that bad, because if you’d get some basic ideas, it’s quite useful, even despite its ugly UI. Sometimes it’s not that easy to distinguish one from another, that’s why the two are usually combined. Interface can be pretty, and most people would call it good, but the experience of using it could be just terrible. Also, experience is what transfers from your experience, so, for a graphics editor, it’s expected that it would follow some de-facto conventions, even if they’re pretty stupid. Once you’d delve into it, it gets difficult to separate, but if we’d simplify, I’d call a UI is just how it looks, and the UX is how it works. At least that’s how I see it. If there’s someone who can explain these better, I’d appreciate to be corrected.