KDE connect can be good too but I like localsend for sharing files with any and all devices like when I’m moving phones and need to send a file to the new one or between my PCs. You’re not wrong though, KDE connect works well for fileshare too.

Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/

Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.

Since you mentioned having ADHD in another comment which I also have, some things that have helped me and may also help those without ADHD as well:

• Remove friction from everyday tasks whenever possible. If you make it easier to get stuff done around the house, you’ll have more bandwidth for other things.

• Setting alarms for things that you have to do is awesome. really helps with staying organized and just being on top of things. same goes for calendar reminders. keeping a calendar took me a while to get into the habit of but its super helpful.

• Anything you can have on autopay that you intend to keep like cell service, internet, utilities* etc. you should. It just makes sense rather than going through it each month for so many different things. *Utilities might not be good to have on autopay just in case you have weird discrepancies. one month I had to pay $1000 for electric. I called before I paid that lol.

• Use a credit card for small things each month to help build credit. i have a card that all its for is my cell service. Its on autopay as well as the payments for that card.

• Keep things in a cart for a while before buying them, it can help you to determine if you actually want that thing or really need it.

Also just cause others were talking about it, I find using videos as well a tutorials and documentation to all be helpful when troubleshooting/figuring things out, everyone learns differently and ADHD makes things like that harder. Having multiple ways to ingest that info can be helpful IMO. Not that anyone here is necessarily wrong in what they said, just coming from someone that also has ADHD, I get the struggles.

Same here man. Was using an s20 for a long time and was generally happy with it but after moving to an s22 due to charging issues, I wasn’t happy with the way that Samsung changed things. I don’t like how they often try to force a Samsung account.

And I REALLY don’t like this. I should never have to look at baked in ads in my OS that I paid for. I don’t care if its just on the lockscreen because you know that’s only the beginning.

“Watch this 30 second ad to change your wallpaper”

No thanks dude.

Gross.

I’m currently in the process of moving everything over to a pixel running GrapheneOS and am glad to be doing so because of shit exactly like this.

I just want technology that does what I want it to and doesn’t spy on me. Shouldn’t be this hard especially if I pay for the product.

Anything to help a fellow Linux user my dude. I’m not as skilled as some of the other folks on here but I try when I can.

I think I saw someone mention hyperland which may be up your alley but you also mentioned you’d like to stay away from Arch so not sure if that’d work in this case.

KDE has changed quite a bit, you might like it better now. I think the recent changes have been good but I guess I dont change it as much as you might want.

TL:DR, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE

Everyone will have their own opinions on this. Just speaking for overall desktop environments, KDE is my top pick. Pretty easy to pick up and change. Works well, feels like Windows but actually good and very customizable. And extensible.

As for the distro behind it, pick your poison. I think either Fedora or Ubuntu. KDE spin would be Kubuntu which is what I currently use. Both are pretty popular and supported well.

Some people dont really care for Ubuntu but coming from Fedora with KDE, its been a much smoother experience personally. Yes, I’m not a fan of snaps, but they can be turned off. In all, I’m using Linux, I’m much better off on Ubuntu than Windows privacy and security wise which are the main things I care about aside from being able to change whatever I god damn please.

I struggle less with shit not working on kubuntu. Fedora for the most part was very solid but there were more than a few times Steam for whatever reason gave me issues on Fedora. I’d consider steam a pretty easy thing to install and use but I had lots of issues with it just not starting or crashing, hanging when downloading updates. Really annoying.

Could be im just better at using linux now than I was back then as Fedora with KDE was my first real jump to Linux from Windows.

Yup was gonna say the same thing.

I took Sydney a couple years after I moved out of my parents place because I wanted a cat. He and his brother fought all the time so my mom thought it’d be better if they were apart.

Sydney and his brother even though they grew up together were better off separate.

Very true. I thought Pop!OS would be easier for me to use and get things to work and in some ways it was, steam didn’t give me grief like Fedora’s KDE spin did.

I had issues with Pop!OS as well, and after switching to Kubuntu, performance is much better.

It was likely due to the Gnome extensions I was using but without them, Pop!OS just felt really unfriendly to me. I like to be able to tweak everything, its one of the reasons why I switched to Linux in the first place and Pop!os just feels way too locked down compared to KDE. Like you mentioned, it kinda felt like I was fighting it at times, especially trying to change the file manager. What a fucking headache, never got that to work either.

Aside from that, Pop is a decent distro, and I think cosmic is going to make it a lot better because Gnome is really the biggest sore spot IMO.

For gaming and browsing, you should have a very similar if not the exact same experience on Linux save for a few cases.

Most browser stuff just works, no real issues with anything in browser in my experience over the last 2 years or so since I switched. Only thing I’ve noticed is some streaming platforms dont allow you to stream in full HD like Hulu for whatever reason, likely piracy concerns. I’m sure theres other minor things too that I may have missed over the years but nothing that really made a difference.

For gaming, aside from multiplayer games with anticheat, its been great. I haven’t had any issues with playing games in my library. Proton is fantastic for steam games and from what I’ve heard, lutris is great as well.

I’m a musician/artist and Linux has been a bad experience for me with music production unfortunately. Between most VSTs not working for me even with yabridge, things would crash, not work at all or would load but then crash in the middle of production. I actually used Reaper and was running PopOS, (great daw BTW, good choice) and while Reaper itself was great, most things, even native Linux VST didn’t work for me. I hope your experience is better than mine but I ended up building a 3rd machine just for music production running Windows 10 with no internet access. I also had Windows only VSTs that I spent a considerable amount of money on so that was also another big thing for me.

Aside from music production, other creative workflows like photo editing have been good with Krita. I’ve heard good things about kdenlive, and davinci resolve Ive heard is good on Linux as well. Ive used davinci resolve myself on windows and its a good video editing software IMO.

The popshop kinda sucks. I went to kubuntu recently just for ease of use and not being so tied in to PopOS’s weird system. I wasn’t able to do simple things like change the file manager without it breaking a ton of shit, even after editing configs. If you dont need to mess around with stuff like that, PopOS is good.

All in all, I’m glad I switched from Windows.

Is linux ready for the education sector? Kinda depends on the tools involved.

If its a google classroom kind of workflow and or everything is done in the browser, absolutely. Theres a reason Chromebooks got popular for schools, not just cause they’re cheap, but being more locked down and basically only useful for in browser work made them a good alternative to Windows machines.

However, some stuff specific to certain courses or classes may not be compatible with linux. Something like a photo editing college course that requires adobe (ew) would be an example.

I’d personally love to see Linux in the education sector more. With immutable distros, no licensing costs, and lower hardware requirements, Linux is likely going to be really attractive to schools that are looking for alternatives.

So sick that you were able to do this. Kudos for taking the initiative and making your community better.

As a artist myself, I think a community dedicated to artists that allows for self promotion would make more sense rather than in already established communities if it doesn’t fit into that communities theme or purpose. So a gaming focused community with a day for game Devs to post about their game makes sense, or a music community where self promo is allowed for an account every few months etc.

As much as I love looking at other peoples work, appreciating their art, and sharing my own, I’m also very mindful that not everyone wants to have that kind of thing in a community dedicated to something else like this one. Self promo stuff can be awesome when someone is passionate about their work but it also can be very spammy type of stuff where someone is a bit too enthusiastic about posting about their album EVERY month.

Thats just my opinion. Nothing wrong with your post asking about it just to be clear.

Yea opensense is the less polished than pfsense, but its decent from what I’ve heard.

I’m not familiar with Idirectord of shorewall. Do you run all that locally? Tbh peplink is ok for the most part but because starlink goes on and off so often, it can get stuck sometimes and because I can’t have a lot of granular control with its load balancing.

Not using that specifically but I have to load balance my internet between starlink and 4g due to the area I live in where the only other option is suffer with 1.5 DSL. Even what I’m doing now is only mostly ok but I’m surrounded by trees.

Due to the restrictions of a lot of providers for mobile data, I use the 5g store with Verizon network, and had to use one of their routers, went with a peplink as at the time, it was the cheapest option.

Peplink does a pretty good job of load balancing between the different connections but i wouldnt use them unless you really have to.

You could use pfsense or opensense to load balance between two connections if thats what your after.

Nice

If anyone hasn’t seen the videos Jim Browning did a while back about gaining access to a india scam call centers network and subsequently, thier cameras, its a fascinating watch but also pretty concerning.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBNmQJqxpaMaxqghShRiOnHUjO00ZCsor

One of the worst parts is that sometimes the police are on the scammers payroll, making it hard to take action. It would likely take an international effort to even make a dent against these kinds of places. They make a ton of money off these scams so its going to keep happening.

This is the way. My brother printer is a hl2040, came out sometime in the early 2000s. It still prints. I’ve replaced the toner cartridge once since my Dad gave it to me back in 2016.

The other day I needed to print something out and this was after I had reinstalled linux.

Just fired right up, instantly recognized. Its one of the best pieces of hardware I own.

Love Ian Davis man, such a cool channel.

Certainly counts, Samsung has a few features like grabbing text from images that I found useful.

My problem with them is its all online stuff and I’d like that sort of thing to be processed on device but thats just me.

I think folks often are thinking AI is only the crappy image generation or chat bots they get shoved to. AI is used in a lot of different things, only difference is that those implementations like drawing assist or that text grabbing feature are actually useful and are well done.