I suppose this is because he ended the Russian agression in Europe months ago!!! \s

Tables are a great starting point. So is something like alternativeto.net and just go down through the list by popularity until you get to something sane.

There is also going to be disagreements about what is best. There is no best app. We all have unique needs and concerns. I know I disagree with many things Op said in such an absolute way.

Was he the one that went to Mexico during that big power outage?

Love how he and the admin do not want to take some ownership of this after wrecking the government. Saying Bidens fault or you should not be asking the question.

More of a rant. Post is kind of nuts. They are talking about a comparison matrix not a check list. How else are you going to compare.

Not surprising. The US is a petro state. It will never want to switch to something else. China and the EU are far more motivated.

Loyalty over competence again it appears. What a surprise.

I like Zim. Used it for years. The big advantages you can have many 1000s of pages and it just uses a folder tree not a database, so you have direct and attachment access if you need it. Zim is a true hierarchical wiki not a simple notes app. There a plugins you can enable for more advanced features.

Zim does get slower with more pages for some operations like searches and some changes. I have one wiki with 4500 pages and do feel it is getting a bit slower sometimes. You can however just create another notebook at any time as long as your content has reasonable dividing lines.

The poor health argument might be valid.

The low income argument on the other hand would suggest continue working and waiting until the SS, pension, and other income sources is enough. Even with poor health you kind of have to still do that to some extent. Don’t get their conclusion about all of that regarding how one can retire without enough income. Just bonkers.

The article was not US based so they really do not understand US retirement anyway. What they mean by pension is Social Security. In the US pension means another form of pension like a corporate or government pension separate from social security.

Actually the safest thing is probably to choose a main system and run the other in a VM like with VirtualBox. For you, you could just install VirtualBox on Windows then Linux inside of a VirtualBox VM. Windows does have a builtin Virtualization solution too you may be able to use, but I have personally never done that. Keep in mind too that VMs are not as performant as bare metal. For video probably NO, for images fine, for audio maybe but you’ll have to see if you get the real-time timing you need in a VM. Good way to play in any case. 2nd best if you have a workstation, not a laptop, you could put in a hot mount SATA drive enclosure, and just swap in the drive you want and get full bear metal performance. Dual boot takes some tech skill. Be sure to back everything up if you do that. Should do that anyway before fiddling. Also if you use bitlocker and secure boot make sure you have all your recovery keys and know how to work with your bios settings too.

Maybe I am missing something, not sure why you care about NTFS. If this is a separate computer you don’t really care about that, just the sharing protocol (SMB for example). If it is on the main box, then you’d probably convert this to Ext4 or something similar. No reason to stick with NTFS with Linux. There are a lot of great FS options on linux plus BTRFS, LVM, or RAID to if you want redundancy.

Regarding apps. The alternativeto site is great. Linux has a bunch of audio and photo software. If your a pro, you may not find any of it sufficient. Especially a lot of people cannot do without Photoshop. The common quoted photo programs are GIMP and Darktable. There are many other photo and image programs. Common audio program is Audacity. Again, there are many others. Looks like some handle vst but I have no personal experience.

Linux only, SSH works fine. Not e2ee. Nextcloud works fine but extra work unless you use a service provider. It can be e2ee but not normally so. Syncthing worth a look too. It is not cloud storage, but direct device transfer. Bitwarden send is useful too if you want to juat send file someone, and thunderbird is working on thunderbird send which might be interesting.

Maybe Synology if you want your own lan NAS?

All email services have vendor lock-in unless your using your own domain.

For what it is worth, I just moved my mail from my ISP to my own domain at a hosting service after 30 years. Took about 5 months to get everything changed but if I can do it anyone can.

Downside, using your own domain is probably less private but kind of depends.

In project management lore there is the tripple constraint: time, money, freatures. But there is another insidious dimension not talked about. That is risk.

The natural progession in a business if there is no push back is that management wants every feature under the sun, now, and for no money. So the project team does the only thing it can do, increase risk.

The memory leak thing is an example of risk. It is also an example of some combination of poor project management including insufficient push back against management insanity and bad business mangement in general which might be an even bigger problem.

My point, this is a common natural path of things but it does not have to always be tolerated.

I get your point but I do not think you should justify releasing crap code because you think it has minimal impack on the customer. A memory leak is a bug and just should not be there.

Yes and Trump is certainly in the pocket of big oil. Do not forget trade routes too and open navigation.

And of course I would disagree regarding nuclear weapons if it can be prevented by whatever means. What route that needs to take I have no idea. People act like war with Iran is like a new thing. Iran has been waging war with the west both directly and indirectly for 50 years. It is not surprising that Israel and the west in general might respond to this in some way at their own time and place.

Their drone, missile, and nuclear programs are of specific concern. The cost of missile defense and drone defense in particular is more costly then the missiles and drones. Plus it is never 100% which means nukes are an even bigger issue. So there is a concerning trajectory combined with long history of experience with Iran and their stated intent.

Ironically it is Iran after all that decided to turn up the temperature at this point in time by supporting the Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi’s, and a half a dozen groups across the middle east, then stupidly launching their own direct attacks on Israel. Moreover they have been directly supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine which has huge implications. Not surprising this might come back to bite them.

So I am not excited about US involvement, but people should not be surprised either. It will be interesting what the US does. Trump is a weak and largely incompetent president, and the US is quite strongly isolationist at the moment. Frankly the general incompetence of the current administration probably makes a hot war more likely. History has shown too that Republicans in power tends to make that more likely too.

Iran is working on a bomb. You do not enrich uranium to 60% for anything else. Commercial uses are like 3%. So, the question is what to do. Nothing, they get nuclear weapons which is clearly their intent. Negotiation is just a delaying tactic and got us to here. So what remains to be done?

Simple. It has not been a priority. If it was, you would see the US invoke the defense priduction act and similarly allocate nearly unlimited funds.

That was my reaction. Since I use Cinnamon and Gnome I use gnome-terminal.

The features I like are cut/paste and the open in terminal feature in the file manger. Nice that it looks good in your DE too. What else does one need?

If you want 2D drafting like solution, look at Librecad. It seems quite good. It is 2D only.

Freecad is 3D solid modeling but there is a 2D component.

I went to one of the gatherings in Apr. Local news way under reported turnout.