Recompiling and replacing libraries was a thing back then - linux had it’s own flavor of ”DLL hell”. I broke a Debian install trying to get an IDE for Mono running by overriding and replacing quite a lot of shared libraries.

That being said I didn’t fully know what I was doing when I started off and the package manager kept warning me.

”You can’t trust free software”

As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.

I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.

I agree, the article is in the uncanny valley where it just feels off. If it weren’t for AI slop, I would call it clickbait.

One solution is to replace the panel and dock with something like the Dash to Panel extension. It consolidates both into a single bar/dock/panel, is highly configurable and works very well. I wanted to get rid of the top panel for your reason as well as my muscle memory wanting the window controls of maximized windows to be on the top of my screen, not below a what essentially is a menu bar.

As with many of these questions, it depends and it’s subjective. In my case I have a machine running Endevour to tinker with and dip my toes into Arch. The philosophy is different where you need to think more about where your packages come from and be able to validate them (especially the AUR). It’s fun to tinker and better understand the underpinnings and on this machine I have very little that I rely on working so am OK with the increased level of jank.

For work I need a system that I can rely on working like it did yesterday and last week as well as having wide support from vendors. For me that means Ubuntu LTS. In many cases there are tools and applications that I really don’t care about how they work internally, just that they can be easily installed and work in-depth.

Bazzite is based on Fedora.

I avoid to.

The last time I did a fresh re-install of Windows for my mom (7 I think, years ago anyway), she came home all happy with a CD containing ”1500 games! Great value!”. I gave up at that point, after that my brothers have dealt with it.

Otherwise, when people want a recommendation (especially at work), I just say plain Ubuntu. Almost everything just works, the UI is simple enough to learn and there’s lots of help to be found online.

Yupp, this is the public beta for 26.04 LTS.

To quote a quote in the article - ”Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement of intent for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.”

If it doesn’t work out at all, they will likely pull the change for 26.04. The LTS has after all a need to be stable as a lot of companies rely on it.

Opening up Win11 and finding out that the simplest of apps - Notepad - now has Copilot integration just enforced my stance that switching to Linux was the right move.

Starting of with some history… I have run Microsoft operating systems since MS-DOS 3.22 and Windows 2.11 (not a typo). I was one of the first in our high school to install Windows 3.0 on one of the school lab machines off of floppy disks when it launched. I have been an early adopter on almost all the Windows OS’s and had a powerful enough PC at the time not to be too bothered about Vista even. I work with Microsoft based development (Windows Server and nowadays Azure) so Windows has always been what worked in my career. That hasn’t changed.

That being said, my computing history started off on a Apple IIc, followed by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga later on. I installed Linux the first time on my 486sx with 4MB of RAM using Slackware with a pre 1.0 kernel. Linux never stuck then as I couldn’t run the applications i needed and games I wanted. I came back to Linux every 5 or so years but it never stuck for the same reasons.

This changes about 5 or so years ago. A chain of things happened over time and it started at home.

• I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on an old laptop and it seemed to have what I needed on it. Mainly browsing and so on - no high demands. The web had moved away from client side plugins and the web just worked.
• Windows 10 nagging to install Windows 11 on my HTPC, when the hardware was too old. Ubuntu 20.04 replaced that install, and the software just worked (browser + Kodi)
• Broadcom purchasing VMWare meant moving away from ESXi in my HomeLab - Proxmox turned out to be mature for what I wanted. I now have a 3 node Proxmox cluster.
• A hard drive crash in one of my Synology NAS boxes led me down a rabbit hole resulting in adopting TrueNAS Scale and ZFS.
• Windows 11 was getting on my nerves for the last couple of years at work. Last year I did the research and took the leap to install Ubuntu 24.04 on my new work laptop. A lot of tools I use are open source - they have reached a decent level of maturity. Microsoft tech such as Dotnet, VSCode, PowerShell and Azure CLI just work for what I need. LibreOffice does a good enough job replacing MS Office. A VM with Visual Studio and MS Office fills the gap - I boot the VM a couple of times a week as needed.
• I installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a secondary desktop last year at home to see if it would fill my needs at home amid the launch of Recall. This resulted in me wiping my main gaming rig a couple of months ago, installing Ubuntu 25.04 as main and a smaller partition with Windows to mainly support flight sims (MSFS and X-Plane - an area where software and hardware support is still lacking on Linux).
• The old laptop that started off with Ubuntu back in 2020 is now distro hopping - Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and currently running EndeavourOS. They are fun playing around with and familiarizing myself with but haven’t quite been work adopting fully so far.

The end result today is that I have one VM in Proxmox running Windows Server and a dual boot on my gaming rig running Windows 11 LTSC. Everything else is either Linux or FreeBSD.

It took a couple of months to get completely comfortable with the changes in workflow of daily driving Linux as my main OS, but it settled and it feel almost nostalgic to boot into Windows now.

Take a look at Draw.io. It has an online mode, but also binary downloads for most operating systems (with everything saved locally).

I agree on your assessment of SketchUp - the old 2017 binary is still my go-to for woodworking design, even if it is a Windows install.

Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.