Year of the Linux Desktop?

Coffee break
21

When you let government to be the primary educator of your children don’t be surprised when the primary lesson they learn is to be completely reliant on and subservient to government.

They are no longer taught economics because we are now a debt based society. Everyone is in debt up to their eyeballs, and no one really understands how entrapped that keeps you. And it starts for most people today with school loans. These poor kids are in debt before their lives even start. Many before they even know what they want to do with their lives. They are indoctrinated all throughout their school primary school years that college and college loans is the only way to go. They don’t learn that debt is like a chain around your neck and the creditor has hold of the other end. They are actually taught that debt is a good thing because that’s how you get what you want today instead of having to wait and save for something. I hear from so many people that they would like to start a business, change careers, move off the grid, etc. But almost no one can because they have debt that keeps them stuck in the rut. It’s Groundhog Day for decades for them. If kids actually learned the consequences of debt before they were eyeballs deep in it they might not do it and the big credit companies won’t have that.

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22

This reminds me of a blog entry I wrote about a year ago, recalling my switch to Linux. Here’s a quote:

At around the same time, Microsoft released Windows XP, with its activation servers. This was their effort to combat piracy of their operating system. XP, so they said, would take a snapshot of the hardware on your system and upload that to the activation servers. If you made a change to your computer, such as swapping out the motherboard, upgrading your hard disk, changing the video card, or adding some other hardware, Microsoft would assume, since your hardware changed, that you were pirating Windows XP by installing the same copy on another computer, and they would deactivate your computer. You could call and beg Microsoft to reinstate your computer, but that decision was up to them.

In my mind, this meant several things:

  • Microsoft could reach out to my computer at any time, or my computer could reach out to Microsoft at any time and upload data to their servers.
  • Microsoft had the power to render my computer useless from afar.
  • I could not, therefore, upgrade my computer’s components as I’d been accustomed to doing.
  • If my hardware snapshot could be uploaded without my knowledge, so technically could anything else.

I could only come to one conclusion: if I installed Windows XP, my computer would no longer be my own. Some part of it would belong to Microsoft. Additionally, I would never be sure I could trust my own computer.

On my personal computer, I have never used Windows XP or any version of Windows that came after it.

I find it fascinating that this would no longer be a reason for people to get away from Windows. For me, it was capitalism, to a certain extent. What I was using no longer served me; I looked for an alternative and found one (and it was Mandrake Linux, BTW).

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I always considered the term “capitalism” to be suspect, especially considering who coined it.
In its loosest sense, it could be said that capitalism is the process of investing some form of capital now, in the expectation of some return on investment later.
Everything from tying your shoelace to mugging little old ladies can be considered “capitalistic.”…it has no moral dimension.
Free markets, on the other hand, do have a moral dimension, a moral dimension that is implicitly expressed in the very term.

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24

I tried Mandrake and RedHat in the early 2000s. Neither was ready for prime-time. Since then. RedHat has become a soul-dead tele-operated Zombie of IBM, but the spirit of Mandrake still lives in OML.

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I was in and out linux since 2003 to 2010. From that point, Im constantly on some sort linux distro. So for me, the period of last 15 years is a linux year.

But general year of linux on desktop will never happen. To many things that are needed for everyday computing is closed source or closed source and unviable for linux. Alternatives are either non existent or not fully compatible with closed source competition. Free cad vs Autodesk AutoCAD. Adobe Ilustrator, Indesign, Photoshop vs Inkscape and scribus Gimp.

You got higher chance for success with Inskape source file .svg in print house then with gimp or scribus file. .psd and .indd are huge standards in the industry. You may getaway with .svg instead of .ai but not with the others.

Accounting software Sage 50 good lack with that on linux. You can’t run sage on Linux and even their database is in exact specified version Microsoft sql server. I Tried to set it on linux failed Database other then ms is unusable period

Someone mention US tax software Easy tax. I Can add Polish sapphire (Szafir application, CryptoCard Graphite, reader drivers) for qualified and non-qualified certificates) governmental standard for every public institution and every single accountant in this country. Anybody who work with broadly understood sensitive data.

Try to set this up on linux . Nope you cant. It is kinda works on ubuntu but faill to work properly. If the certificates are seen, they cannot be handled for various reasons

I can write for hours giving example after example

26

By the definition capitalism is

  • Private ownership of the means of production:

Individuals or private entities own and control the resources used to produce goods and services.

  • Profit motive:

The primary goal of economic activity is to generate profit for the owners of the means of production.

A system where prices are determined by supply and demand with minimal government intervention.

  • Competition:

Businesses compete with each other to attract customers and maximize profits.

It died when corporations were born

Capitalism is fine but it is long dead killed by corporacionism. And we can do shit about it.

27

I had no trouble publishing a book using IngramSpark for the physical book and individually uploading to all the providers of ebooks. All anybody wanted was a PDF or an ePub: both are open formats.

I hired someone to do the cover; he gave me the .ai file, but he also gave me .eps, .jpg, .png, and tif files. I did all the physical layout in Scribus; I did the cover layout from his image in Scribus also. Exported both the cover and the interior to PDF for Ingram; no issues whatsoever.

I’ve also used Lulu to publish books; they also only work in PDFs. If your software can produce a PDF, the print shop is happy. No need for proprietary formats.

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So far as I’m aware, desktop use is declining outside the work environment.

IMO the thing to chase is is corporate deployments. And that surely means making life easy for the IT team. I’m in the 5-man IT team for an engineering company with ~350 employees. I’d love to get rid of Windows.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that may be solvable individually but put together can really discourage corporate deployments.

Speaking only for my workplace (Warehouse automation and robotics), some these are:

  • M365 - we’re heavily hooked into MS for identity management and authentication.
  • O365 - we’ve got ~30 years of legacy documentation at this point and LibreOffice doesn’t cut it. Not to mention the fact that literally all of our customers use Teams and send us MS files.
  • Outlook Classic - sorry to say this but nothing gets close at the moment.
  • Cloudification/Sharepoint - we’re 3 years into migrating at this point.
  • Endpoint Management - ManageEngine is terrible and MS Intune only supports RHEL and Ubuntu. We’d want a single pane of glass for all endpoints.
  • Antivirus - who are the main & good providers? And can they integrate with UEM?
  • Expertise/Training/time - my team is heavily Windows- and iOS-focussed, and training funds are small to nonexistent. Time to investigate things is even rarer. So we go with what we know.
  • AutoDesk software e.g. AutoCAD. There are no linux-based alternatives that I know of.
  • Siemens TIA Portal/Step 7. There are no linux-based alternatives that I know of. Hell - some of the software doesn’t support W10.
  • (Usable) Barcode printing software is pretty much Windows only.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. However, unless MS really screws up, I doubt it’ll happen.

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Anecdotally, I knew a guy in the 2000s, worked for M$ support before it went to India. He told me that whenever they got support calls about corrupted Word and Excel files, that they’d have the customer send it over, open and save it in Open office, and send it back, magically fixed.

There are lots of great CAD programs for Linux, and the arguments against them in favor of AutoCAD are pretty much the same arguments against The Gimp in favor of Photoshop.
Also, Linux is making inroads in the gaming community.

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As long as you aim to produce e-books you are fine, when you want to have printed books that is whole another story with a lot of unpleasant surprises.
They an by overcome for the most part, but not all of them, and you need time and open-minded people in your chosen print house to do so

Its all about pdf standart for print and color spaces for print. No I’m not talking about CMY itself. When you want a paper print things gets weird really weird.

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I believe this image will help explain everything when it comes to Microsoft Office:

Gook luck with that mess.

About 3 years ago, a friend became fed up with Microsoft spying on him and forced updates (downgrades) while he was using Windows 10. Being an independent contractor working from home, it was his computer, free of corporate dictates. It was a Lenovo, about 3 years old, and was super slow.

He asked if I could install Linux on it, along with Microsoft Office. I told him that while installing a Linux distro was possible, Office was no go. He would have to use LibreOffice, Only Office, or WPS Office. He wanted it, convincing himself those were exactly 100% look and feel like Microsoft Office.

I told him to find out what Linux distro was being used in the corporate world. He told me Red Hat because “IBM.” So I installed Fedora along with LibreOffice. At the time, I was not aware of the massive wokeness at Red Hat and Fedora. I noticed his hardware was still on the slow side, because that Lenovo had a spinning drive instead of an SSD. I told him what it would cost to replace it with a new SSD. He didn’t want to spend the $50 on that. But he was willing to throw $100 at me for my effort.

The first thing that he noticed was while the computer was significantly faster, it still ran slow because of the hard drive speed. The next thing that happened was he noticed that Plasma is not Windows 10. I should have installed a Windows 10 look and feel theme.

Then there was LibreOffice. None of the menus and icons were exactly the same as Microsoft Office. Scream-fest time.

He is one of those people who is very set in his ways and fights back when it comes to learning new things. You should have seen what a big deal he made when he replaced his 17-year-old Dodge with a 2022 Ford. Yes, those people exist.

So he starts working in LibreOffice. He claims that it was scrambling the documents (see above link to the meme). Yet, he could import Google Docs files with no problem. Then there was the issue of saving files. He kept on saving them to the default LibreOffice format rather than putting in the tiny effort to save them using the Microsoft Office format. Of course, the people at the corporation had no idea with how to load LibreOffice format files into Microsoft Office. I assume:

  1. It can’t be done.
  2. It can be done, but is buried so deep that an oil well drilling rig is required to get down that far into the Microsoft documentation.

In the end, he bought a used corporate HP laptop with Windows 10 installed, with a free upgrade (downgrade) to Windows 11 Spyware Edition. He has had nothing but trouble with it ever since. Windows 11 spies on him, while Microsoft Office refuses to save anything to his local drive, insisting on using One Drive. He wanted me to fix it. I told him that Microsoft Office is what it is.

He is one of those people who believes that Microsoft can’t spy on him, so long as he never connects to the Internet. Trouble is, he has to connect for work. So he connects for only a few minutes. Just long enough to do his work while Microsoft does its data collection and installs the latest updates (downgrades). I tried to explain that it doesn’t work that way. He could install a firewall at the router to possibly block Microsoft. Trouble is, his router lacks firewall capabilities.

Then his monitors quit working. In the end, he had to downgrade (upgrade) to Windows 10 and install an older version of Microsoft Office in order to get his monitors working again. How long is he able to keep that running? I have no idea.

But I did prove that while it is possible to lead a horse to water, making it drink is up to the horse.

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32

I didn’t find that to be the case. Like I said above, all any of the print services I’ve used wanted was a PDF, whether color or B&W. As long as your software can produce that, you’re good. No proprietary files needed.

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33

Probably an EU thing.
Heck, those folk tried to regulate the shape of bananas, or what you can and cannot call a Cornish Pastie, or Champaign.

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In the USA, the official system of units is the Metric System. The big difference is that the USA didn’t deem it necessary to force every Tom, Dick and Harry to use it, at gunpoint, like Europe and and Canada did, thus the ongoing myth that the USA uses only Imperial units.

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UE Is a crazy legislatory shithole thats true

Yet printhouses accept inches or points or centimeters in example Poland. Lots of print houses give you dimension in points or inches. Shit hits the fan with which exact version of adobe rgb system should be used in project. There are a few. In some cases in open software implementation of them is shitty. Gimp color depth recently got widened to 16 bit, but was the 8 bit for ages. The accuracy of the color palette in GIMP, for example, compared to the accuracy of the Adobe PS color palette is a fucking joke.
Add to that how the printing house’s software will see the color palette from, say, your Inkscape SVG. There is no guarantee that it will see it correctly.
There are a whole bunch of factors that can mess things up.Shit hits the fan with Pantone colours. In some cases tiff file format may save your ass. I literally envy @sez11a for his smooth work with print houses using linux software. I literally happy for him.

Giving the open formats to print house is not always pleasant experience.
It is definitely better then 10 years ago

Take care people

I do not want to start a flame war here

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Man, so sorry to hear that. I was actually trying to be encouraging, as in hey, try it now! It’s not so bad like it used to be.

I’m pretty sure IngramSpark has a presence in the EU.

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I would love to see the EU try to regulate pasties, the national food of Yooperland. That’s ‘Above The Bridge,’ ‘The UP,’ or ‘Upper Michigan’ for those without a snow machine. Why should the EU try? Just to watch them lose their minds as they are taken across Lake Huron to Mackinac Island on a snowmobile or ATV.

It is pronounced Mackinaw, despite being spelled with a ‘c.’ I blame the French, because they spelled it that way.

I remember when that attempt was made in the 1970s. It started when I was in grade 8. I knew exactly what would kill it. What did the indoctrination camps formerly known as schools demand? Every student must learn how to convert inches and feet to meters, miles to kilometers, pounds to kilograms, gallons to liters, and so on. That insanity lasted for all of a year as part of “math class.” All before calculators, everything done longhand, paper and pencil. Once the parents got wind of it from their children, the entire plan was doomed. Keep in mind, this was before the Department of Uneducation existed to lower standards and hide failing grades. Parents still had control of school boards back then.

For about a decade or so, interstates had mile markers mixed with signs to the next city listed in both miles and kilometers. I-19 in Arizona was 100% kilometers until recently, when the conversion to miles was implemented.

Today, Coca-Cola is sold in one and two liter containers, guaranteed to collapse from its own weight during transport from the plant to the warehouse, bags of chips are sold by the gram, milk by the gallon, meat by the pound, auto parts are metric, distances are still in miles. It is a mixed system and most people don’t even realize it.

Canada still isn’t fully metric. The railroads still do business in imperial measurements. I suspect the Canadian boats on the Great Lakes still travel in miles per hour, just like their American counterparts. Which is a real oddity because the rest of the maritime world uses knots, not miles per hour.

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Your environment probably has a lot of SSO enabled/partnered with M$. Not really a good place to be fiscally speaking. Even if you operate with hybrid AD-DS, corporate/enterprise doesn’t really gain that much from it. There gets to be a point where the scaled up cloud equals a reasonably priced hypervisor and a BCDS system that will run virtual machines from your restore points and is ransomware resilient by design. Something that M$ does not offer.

This just requires migrating them to an OpenXML format. Something most businesses don’t have or make the time to do. Office compatibility mode for documents is not a good thing.

That’s really not true. Your users and management want it because it’s familiar. Both KDE and GNOME (for better or worse) offer something comparable.

That’s because you hit pitfalls that come with migrating to the cloud. I guarantee no one read the fine print about how business data and PII might be at risk.

There are plenty of RMM/PSA/Service Desk offerings that support all platforms, including mobile. Comodo/Itarian is one that comes to mind. They used to have a free version, as well so you can try it out without needing to make a full cut over.

There is a minimal amount of that in *nix environments. Comodo also offers a client for Linux unless you want to use something else like ClamAV for your mail server. There are mail server products that have it already attached.

This is typically done by identifying the most technically adept in a give team in the company and crosstraining them on a Linux distro. They tend to pass along what they learn to others in the team by attrition.

If you really needed AutoDesk, they operate AutoCAD and 3DSMax in the cloud.

You could test it with wine. Nothing is lost by doing that but time. Again, the subject matter experts of your teams will be the ones that could spend an hour a day doing that.

Barcodes are just fonts. You just need the format and the font face.

These are the most widely distributed inaccuracies about Linux being viable as a desktop in a commercial setting. I would expect to see these excuse in the first five hits of a Google search on these topics.

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39

I appreciate that people want Linux to conquer the desktop (I’m one of them). However, I have to concede that there are non-trivial numbers of users for whom Windows is the only option.

Where I work, everyone can and does use Windows. However, only a fraction (~1/4) of them could realistically move to Linux right now. So long as that’s true, Windows will continue to be our default for desktops.

There’s also the point that such a change would require backing from the higher-ups. Unless there’s a drastic reason to move, there’s little prospect of the board allowing the time, money, effort, drama and disruption for such an event.

And there’s your point about the users and management not wanting to change. Whether it’s valid or not, it’s a real obstacle to moving anything anywhere - especially when those skeptics are the same ones who would have to work around, and pay for, the change I want.

Now, I personally dislike answering posts point-wise, but there are a couple of things I wanted to pick up.

That’s not an option, unfortunately. A significant amount of the design work occurs in warehouses that either don’t fully exist yet or are … old.

Either way, there’s rarely an internet connection and the mobile reception is 3G at best. Which means the design engineer gets a laptop with a meaty GPU.

Our latest project is trialling Starlink so maybe that will bear fruit.

Yeah we tried it. The results were not encouraging.

Truth being told, the software barely works on Windows.

And the contracts with the manufacturers prevent us doing it anyway.

There’s rather a lot more to it than that. The spec just for GS1 ran to a few hundred pages last time I read it, not to mention the text encoding necessary to use Code 128 etc.

There’s the fact that, if you don’t exactly match the stripes to the printing dots, you won’t get the contrast ratio necessary for the conveyor scanners or approval by the carriers.

And we need the label in <2s.

Now we could spend multiple months writing software to do all this for each label template, and have people learn all the intricate rules.

Or we could buy off-the-shelf from a company that has already taken care of all of that and we just draw the thing. Especially if that company is the same one that writes the drivers for the printer manufacturers.

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This could probably help. I’m sure there are other FOSS solutions already created to handle this problem.

https://www.zint.org.uk/

I have worked in more than one place that required barcoding for things and found not commercial resources for it. One of those solutions, I found over 20 years ago.