So then what? Use different messengers internally and externally?

I do usually end up asking my team to do this.

The external one is usually Slack or Teams.

I figure it’s worth it for the faster turn around of communication with key clients.

Thankfully, both have web interfaces that work fine on Linux.

Fair enough!

Conversion

First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.

For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.

Authoring PDFs

For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.

Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.

But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.

But can I just use plain text? (Yes)

For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.

For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.

You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.

Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.

I think the PineTime is nice enough, for being relatively new, surprisingly cheap, and fully open source.

It doesn’t have all of the features of a $300 watch, but it doesn’t cost as much either.

I’m just glad this didn’t get weird.

Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing, and notifications with pop-ups and sounds.

Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.

Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work. My boss knows and doesn’t care. My peers are just surprised when I mention it, because I use the same tools without issue.

Zoom works great on Linux, as well, both in bowers and as the native app. Many corporate VPNs are compiant with open standards, and so don’t even require any additional install. Cisco’s isn’t made right, but they provide a Linux client that works fine.

Slack works fine in browser, including full first class notifications. I haven’t sought out a dedicated client app, but I recall having some options.

DropBox and Google have particularly decent Linux client applications, and of course, fully functional web tools.

There’s also some excellent ways to run Android apps nearly seemlessly inside an Android emulator of Linux. In theory, I could resort to those, but I haven’t because everything I need works in a web browser now.

I’ve heard that the two glaring exceptions are AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite. I understand that neither works on Linux or in a browser (per other threads on Lemmy).

Oh yeah, and Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does, and of course reads them without issue

Oh, and yes, mandatory compliance stuff like antivirus tools and CrowdStrike also have compliant options for Linux. Some of the really shitty spyware level invasive stuff probably hasn’t been ported to Linux, but the “keep me virus free” stuff seems pretty available - because they want to sell copies for Linux servers.

Edit: If this seems needlessly thorough, it is because I worked to independently verify all of these details before my upgrade. I figure my notes might help someone making the case to switch, or just researching whether they need to not switch.

Nowadays I leave them in separete drives, with debian and grub as the main option, windows don’t even have a chance to interfere since the bios boot the debian drive first.

Nice! I imagine that could have saved me many headaches.

I see some comments trashing dual boot, I really don’t understand why.

Back when I dual booted, every Windows update was a dice roll whether and how it would decide to fuck up my dual boot setup.

Sometimes it decides to “fix” grub. Sometimes it wanted to encrypt something new to protect me from all the theives that wander through my living room. Sometimes Windows just had an update that was 1000% sure that Windows was the default boot entry, and so doing something extremely sensitive and rebooting to finish without telling the user, should be fine.

Windows under dual boot, for me, was like having a fragile semi-suicidal pet. I found myself doing constant research to rescue it from itself.

Eventually I did let it die.

So I’m not mad at it, exactly. I’m just over it.

That’s exactly how my last copy of Windows retired itself.

Yes. I’m inclined to avoid Cloudflare, if I’m able, for now.

Cloudflare feels like they’re doing the same kind of “were too big and cool to pay our staff or think about uptime” that I’ve been suffering from under AWS, recently.

Haha. Yes, I’m looking for a DNS service, at the moment. Thanks anyway!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I need to find out more about Minecraft and hosting a server sounds like a good idea

I’ve hosted both Minecraft and Luanti (free open source Minecraft). Either is a great idea!

That said, I found setting up a Luanti server slightly simpler (because no need for everyone to have a Microsoft account, and no Java dependencies to worry about): https://docs.luanti.org/for-server-hosts/setup/

Luanti has lots of options, but a good default choice is Mineclonia: https://content.luanti.org/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/

Until we have affordable fully open phone hardware specifications, the current phone hardware oligopolies will continue to gate keep with brittle proprietary drivers to ensure that people stay inside their walled surveillance garden.

Well, my current distro reading this, and current socks worn happen to be an exact match.

So confirmed, I guess.

Slackware

It’ll be interesting to see how the Steam Machine in January affects this.

It might not be a huge immediate boost. I have friends who want to buy a Steam Machine on day one - but they already use a SteamDeck as their primary gaming rig.

I expect the Steam Machine to catch on the same way the SteamDeck seems to have - word of mouth.

I know I bought my SteamDeck after a friend demoed theirs to me, and it kind of sold itself.

“I don’t have time to learn it.”

Although it’s weird now, because we usually have this conversation while they wait for Windows to crash, restart, search up a patch, apply it, and reboot.

It’s awkward. But I still kind of get it. Who has time to try something new when the current thing barely works.

I screw up my own system way more often than that lol

Same! But the ones I cause don’t count.

It does feel like the major outages are growing closer together.

I want to blame plugging AI where it doesn’t belong, but I suppose that putting everything into the same couple of server closets could be the primary root cause.