The penguin is merciful.

In the same spirit, yeah. It has a pretty active community from what I’ve heard.

Had basically the same exact scenario with my parents earlier this year.

Installed Linux Mint with the default Cinnamon desktop, installed a “Windows” theme. Put icons on the desktop exactly where there old ones were, and never looked back.

It’s been great for them, does everything they need and took minimal effort from me to set up.

It’s the ease if use. In Windows, you select an option called kiosk mode, select a user account or create one to use, then tell Windows what webpage/site URL to use for the locked down browser interface. Then you click go and that’s it.

You have a locked down, reasonably secure single-use kiosk for your Company HR portal, in-house web app, or training portal, literally takes less than 5 minutes, and is so simple, I could walk a non-techie through the whole process easily over the phone.

Things like cage are already more technical and tough to setup than that, by a large margin.

It’s great if you need something more powerful, or you want a bunch of kiosks that you can roll out on a low power SBC. But for one-off basic kiosks that use a little mini-tower, Windows kiosk mode is pretty great.

Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

It’s the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.

😆

Modern web engines are basically mini operating systems. Long gone are the days where a web browser just needed to render basic HTML pages, handle some simple protocol actions, and render images.

To build something that supports all of the latest web standards, is secure, is always up to date, and on top of all that, is performant, requires a large group of very skilled devs working constantly on all those components.

Web development, for better or worse, has become a massive and rapidly evolving ecosystem that is constantly morphing and changing. Web apps are becoming the standard, and even “simple” modern websites are absolutely filled with different widgets and frameworks for all the different elements they contain.

If a very large/rich org or company decided to dedicate a whole team of devs to build a FOSS web engine, it could happen, but that used to be Mozilla, and look how that has slowly been failing.

What person with a website that has any significant traffic would willingly break it for 80+ percent of its users? That will never happen, sadly.

Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.

Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.

It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.

It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.

I’m starting to get the hang of it. I was using Debian, so I had to figure out the basics of venv because many of the frameworks I was trying to learn require newer versions of Python than what comes with Debian.

vscodium works really easily inside it though, so it wasn’t too bad, but I still feel like I’m treading water a little bit.

As a baby Python Dev, I’m glad it’s not just me.

Lol

10 seconds? That’s generous.

My gaming rig has been running Nobara for years now, it’s built off of Fedora by the developer who does the glorious eggroll version of Proton.

It’s got multiple desktop environment versions and is optimized for Linux gaming. It has a bunch of gaming-specific kernel patches and optimizations. Extra drivers pre-installed for controllers and Nvidia GPUs, etc.

It has a very easy update wizard, I run it once every few weeks, works awesome.

Nobara Linux

Getting better all the time!

Friendly reminder to give your fair and honest Steam review of Apex Legends after EA’s most recent changes. 😈

My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.

Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.

Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.

Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.

It’s really solid.

KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.

Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don’t need to look sexy.

My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.

Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.

Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I’ve tried to like it for years, but I just don’t care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.

I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I’ve watched.