Yeah if this is for a small number of users, I would recommend wireguard or tailgate.

Port forwarding is asking for trouble.

Element is a complete disaster.

Like, completely unmaintained and broken.

Matrix works over i2P and Tor, just proxy the service.

P2P chat could include retroshare but it’s not really a solution due to a variety of ux issues.

I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve even seen vendors using it.

I know it’s E2EE and open source but there is a lot of Metadata.

What other limitations does it have?

I often remote into my machine, so it’s a lot easier to type the command.

I agree, it’s not often considered a systems programming language and it may not be the perfect tool here.

However, it is worth mentioning that cgo Can serve as a escape hatch depending on the use case.

Ah my bad, didn’t read.

Odin is a nice choice then, beef is another small bespoke language.

There is also zig, Go and Rust.

No language is perfect, but those languages have some features that are nice.

Sounds like PGP keys?

Windows may be easier for games, they’re exclusively written for Microsoft so that’s to be expected ( although Valve has done a lot here).

Generally speaking, modern distributions like Fedora will be no more difficult than Windows or Mac. The important distinction is that it will be different.

Microsoft has spent a lot of effort putting their operating system into every single school and business on the face of the Earth and as a result many have decades of training with that OS. That doesn’t mean their operating system is better or easier. It just means it’s familiar. If you used Android for two decades and then picked up an iPhone, I’m sure that would be just as difficult.

In the scientific space, we’ve been using *nix systems since well before Microsoft was even around so our tooling doesn’t typically support Microsoft. For us Microsoft is more difficult because that’s the training that we have.

So, it’s not that Linux has a worse user experience per se, rather it provides a different user experience. Some may consider shell scripts worse than control panel, but that’s a preference. One isn’t worse than the other. They are just different.

In my opinion:

• Web browser
  • exactly the same
    • slight edge to in terms of privacy and security (there’s a reason Tails isn’t written in Windows)
• Media – Movies
  • exactly the same

The difference is in work, If your workflow is heavily Microsoft focused, Is a truly awful experience and you’ll feel like a second-class citizen. But if you’re working on technical things, the inverse is true, eg

For document production:

• TeX
  • Linux is much easier
• HTML / Markdown / pandoc
  • Linux is much Easier
• Microsoft Office
  • Windows is much better here
    • I don’t use Microsoft Office though so YMMV

Finally, it’s not really fair to lump all the next distributions into the same bucket, Is over 1,000 distributions and they are all quite different, Only common element is the kernel.

Gentoo is very technical but it’s also very interesting, Arch is similar. Fedora OTOH we’ll usually walk out of the box And you have your choice of desktop environment with Good support for alternative window managers like sway/Hyprland etc.

Yeah I hear that, good point.

Arch has great documentation but also a bit more config.

I would vote for Fedora over debian though. Debian packages are so far out of date that it becomes a pain and copr works quite well.

Well, I can only offer my experience.

I teach programming and Mathematics full-time and I’ve been doing so for the last few years. I must use 20 different machines every semester.

Every single time, windows users cannot install python, they cannot install latex, SQL etc. And of course every single time the machine is riddled with garbage and just opening the start menu takes seconds. It’s probably more correlation than causation, but students on Linux always perform better In the course.

Mac Users certainly have it better but installing basic software (git, fish, ripgrep, neovim etc. ) is still quite challenging.

Much of the teaching staff have been using Linux for the past 5 to 20 years and probably have not relied on Windows since maybe 95/xp/2000 (my old supervisor started on Solaris apparently 🤷)

We sit there amazed that anybody would use this. It runs like shit, It’s riddled with ads, installing software is painful, most software isn’t packaged for it (exceptions being subscription-based software like Adobe), it’s a privacy nightmare and of course you have to pay for the bloody thing.

I guess my point is, maybe you find Linux more difficult than Windows because you’ve been using Windows for the past 20 years and so you’re approaching it from a different perspective.

From our perspective, we could go back to Windows and wouldn’t struggle with the technical side of things too much, but there is no doubt that it’s an inferior experience.

Tbf, this is more HP failing to support their hardware than a failure in Linux to be more flexible and performant.

Yeah as others have said, HP does not have a great reputation for laptops and stuff.

Grab a cheap ThinkPad, they usually work very well.

I started on Linux as a kid and let me tell you, being curious about windows, welp that’s been horrific.

Curious in this case is a strong term, quite a few of my students are on Windows and that OS is a mess. I don’t care much for apple but at least MacBooks work.

If it’s just a server, Alpine and docker will do most things with good reliability and security.

Otherwise I’ve actually always used void and arch. While those aren’t typical choices for a server, it shows that it’s hard to go wrong.

Choose a distribution that appeals to you and it’ll work great.

For this use case, alpine sounds good.

See also Inkscape.

Doesn’t quite fit OPs want of self hosted, but still very good.

There is also Asymptote and tikz for more technical stuff.

Perhaps you’re simply more familiar with Microsoft / Apple, maybe it’s not more difficult?

I too use Linux for work, but I have limited experience on Microsoft systems and have been on Linux based systems for over a decade. For me windows is a chore.

In my opinion, it’s a matter of perspective and experience. Yours is aligned with something different, that’s all.

Couldn’t agree more.

Important benefits include:

• types (eg dates)
• easy import into duckdb

Can be viewed with visidata

Perhaps another perspective is where to draw the line in terms of expected expertise.