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Desktop
Operating Systems
Curious about breaking away from Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS? There are many reasons to do so!
- Privacy.
- Freedom of choice.
- Escape planned obselecense.
- Give new life to old hardware.
- Run services on a super stable framework.
- Learn something new!
Debian / Ubuntu / Pop!_OS / Mint / etc
This is the family that I have the most experience with. I started with Ubuntu and fall back to it any time I have a device with off hardware which needs a "just works" distribution.
Fedora / Red Hat / Oracle
These systems are more often seen in enterprise enviroments. Fedora is free and can be set up as rolling release for those wanting up to date versions of software. Red Hat and Oracle Linux are typically purchased by businesses for the support contracts.
Arch / Manjaro
Many power users like the Arch family of operating systems because of the availability of recent software versions, sometimes even being bleeding edge. They are also very customizable, not making as many upfront decisions for you like the distributions run by organizations.
Cloud Storage
Nextcloud
File storage, office suite, private messenger, calendar and contact syncing, email reader, music player, text and markdown editor, TBD, TBD. Nextcloud seems to have a solution for most things, especially in enterprise environments. It can easily be self-hosted and the documentation is very extensive.
An example of how I run my Nextcloud can be seen in my Docker enviroment's compose file:
Office Suites
LibreOffice
In the early 2010s this software was already good enough that if I exported my homework as a PDF, professors had no idea that I was not using Microsoft Office as required by the university.
Later that decade, and especially in the 2020s, I was able to use it in a corporate environment on any Office files without anyone knowing that they were created or edited with free software.
It has all the subprograms you'd expect; Writer for Word, Calc for Excel, Impress for PowerPoint*TBD, and even Base for Access. I'm not aware of any reason to keep an Office subscription.
Collabora [TBD]
TBD
Collabora (via Nextcloud) [TBD]
TBD