Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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.


  • My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.

    I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.

    • Our DC with AD on it, I used Remmina to RDP into it for admin tasks.
    • O365 and Azure/Entra stuff was all in the browser.
    • Our ERP system is cloud-based, so browser was fine for that too.
    • Our access control system was cloud-based and the RFID card reader/writer was plug-n-play on Linux.
    • Our company SMB share worked fine with Linux in Plasma using my AD credentials.
    • I set up my company OneDrive sync using rclone, it also worked flawlessly.
    • Our Fortigate firewall VPN has a native Linux app which, although ugly as sin, works without issue.
    • I used OnlyOffice for a while, then switched back to LibreOffice. Both worked basically perfect, a few very minor font bugs, (bullet lists having a slightly different style for the bullets, etc.)
    • Teams, I used a wrapper flatpak for a while, which worked fine, then switched to the browser version of Teams. No major issues, I had a bunch of meetings, screen shares, webcam, presentations all on Teams in Linux, pretty seamless.
    • Email, Outlook in the browser is fine. I also used Thunderbird for a bit, but didn’t like how buggy it was in the Flatpak version, and the Debian package was way too out of date for my taste.

    Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.


  • Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.

    And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.

    I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.


  • My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

    I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

    One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

    I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

    After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

    He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.


  • My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

    I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

    Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

    I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

    Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

    Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.



  • Early this year, I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.

    Very old, low power desktop, it was already running super slowly with Windows.

    It’s been great, the computer is much more responsive now, everything works just fine. Browser is the same, Spotify app from the store is great, printer/scanner, icons on the desktop, their ultrawide monitor, it all #justworks.

    I also don’t have to worry now about my dad clicking every weird and sketchy email link and ad.

    Automatic updates are set up, and Timeshift snapshots are too, in case something breaks and needs rollback.



  • For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.

    That being said, I don’t hate it, but I also don’t recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.

    For ex-windows users like my parents who aren’t tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penguins.


  • You fell for the meme lol.

    Arch is great if you want very high levels of customization without having to get into compiling and coding, like with Gentoo or NixOS.

    I think of it as the distro equivalent to custom keyboard kit, you get all the parts and can swap them out as much as you want. But you’re not designing and fabricating your own circuit board and microcontroller, writing your own custom firmware, getting a custom case modeled and fabricated, etc.

    There’s a reason “I use Arch, BTW” Is a meme.