I had a hell of a time getting off Win7 for similar reasons, was holding onto it well past the launch of Win10. Old habits die hard and a lot of things just didn’t work right for me in Linux.
The only thing that allowed me to break ties was Linux Mint with the MATE desktop. I just sat down and started working, a month later I hadn’t touched my Windows laptop and the rest is history. In time I was able to branch out from there.
Finding that home base is probably the most important thing, don’t sweat the hype over one DE/distro vs another, Deepin in particular has a strange cult of praise in Linux media with a lot of vague praise in constant repetition.
Keep hopping till one sticks!
This SVG really helped me with distro discovery, it’s also searchable with Ctrl + F
Thanks! I’m hoping I’ll be back onto Ubuntu or elementary OS really soon… Perhaps when 20.10 and/or elementary OS 6 drop!
Um also you just taught me that text in SVG files are actually searchable and my mind has been blown! That’s fantastic and I can’t believe I haven’t noticed that before! Thanks!
This week I tried to compile my old Qt4 project with new Qt5 and OpenCV. I forgot how annoying c++ is when it comes to libraries.
I’ll probably end up creating new project and copying code manually bit by bit to see where it fails.
This week I played with Linux Mint’s Warpinator tool (it shares single files across a LAN). Very nice! I love simple, polished, convenient apps like this.
This is far simpler than how peer-to-peer-within-a-LAN file sharing works in Windows or MacOS! Linux has a competitive edge here that it’s not making the most of. Warpinator is under-appreciated, IMHO, and I hope one of the great DLN podcasters make some sort of episode about it.
Warpinator is an order of magnitude simpler than Syncthing. (Note: Syncthing is still a great choice when you have deeply nested folders of files, and you want to automatically sync them.)
Every Linux Distro would do well to include Warpinator in a default Desktop install, IMHO! I think apps like this are a no-brainer (for inclusion), for how very useful they are (it’s a Flatpak now also, BTW).
Just got my hands on a Raspberry Pi ZeroW and the Retroflag GPi case, so I’ve been fiddling around with various RetroArch images on it. Much fun is being had.
This week I learned about the calendaring function in Nextcloud. I can import the calendar into Thunderbird 78 (very nice), and I can also sync to my Android phone, through Davx5. It’s not flawless, but workable.
I’m really grateful for all of these Calendar-related apps, especially Thunderbird 78. The sync-to-and-from-the-cloud functionality is working well.
Still enjoying my GPi, although I’ve learned I need some beefier rechargeable batteries for it. Fedora 33 beta is trucking along fine after I did an in-place upgrade from 32 to get around a SecureBoot issue.
Oh, and I did eventually have to break into the non-free repositories due to some video codecs I needed.
made a birthday greeting out of Bongo cat, using OBS to record a little bongo performance, hilariously over breakbeats. This earned me a LOL from the recipient.
I made a folded, printed greeting card using Scribus. I had to make a textbox upside down, for the front cover (which included a picture), which appeared right-side up once folded.
played with Linux Mint “Warpinator” a lot, as I sent files to some fellow Zoom conference attendees (sending files from my laptop which I do trust, over to my laptop which I don’t trust, and run Zoom on).
Longest story short, I’m on Fedora 33 KDE. It is a great new offering from Fedora. Big Blue has huge resources and Red Hat has developers who aren’t afraid of innovating, even to a fault. Everything is going well…
… except Copr is no AUR. Flathub is no AUR. Snap Store (sudo yum install snapd – wow!) is no AUR.
The AUR is a really huge resource and the ability to add and remove apps from the AUR through the package manager, with all the dependency tracking that entails, is real nice. Not having it feels like missing a big chunk of functionality. I’m sure as I get used to the Fedora Way, I’ll become more adept at using it. I do like the polish you get with a big distribution with a large development team.
I discovered Tesseract-ocr today. OCR is Optical Character Recognition. Usually it’s used for scanning books into digital text for speech synthesis for the visually impaired BUT it turns out to be a great tool for the extremely lazy!
I enrolled in an IT program at my local college and since everything is online right now we use Zoom to have classes. Well I figured there had to be a better way to take notes and copy down HTML or C++ code during class and this is it! I take a quick screenshot of the Zoom meeting while the prof. is sharing notes on his screen, run the OCR software on the area of the image I need, copy, paste, DONE!
I discovered Tesseract when I bought my first Amazon eBook. It was a programming guide and the DRM prevented copy/paste of several pages long example scripts.
Amazing how forwards is backwards sometimes but Tesseract turned things back around.
This week I did a Mattermost migration from one server to another. A bit hairy, but decently straightforward. The downtime wasn’t too shabby, like maybe 15 minutes.
