Good for you.

I learned a really strange (yet rather obvious in hindsight) lesson a week or so ago. I recently deployed Apache Guacamole at work for webby access to an RDP box with MFA. We are dumping MS’s RDG because it is not very flexible and is really complicated. One of my younger members of staff uses it whilst in the office and are almost pathetically grateful for me setting up the Guacamole thing 8) (WTF).

She’s an Apple aficionado. She can now use her Apple thingie as St Jobs intended and also connect to work stuff, which is largely Windows and Linux based but the Linux stuff is abstracted away to the browser.

The key point is that she considers herself as an Apple person for want of a better word and can be an Apple whilst using our corp MS and Linux gear and it appears to her that it is all integrated.

I’m 53 years old and have been doing IT for around 30 years. We really have to get to grips with how people think and work.

mead

Do you really drink a honey based brew?

There is almost certainly a binary version of gcc in Gentoo. I ran Gentoo for 20 odd years and also generally insisted on compiling everything. I recall gcc going from v3 to 4. My laptop ran for over a week on a glass table with a prop to keep the fan vent unobstructed.

I probably should have learned back then that I didn’t really understand exactly how the toolchain worked and how to get from ebuilds to binary code really works. I’m a sysadmin and not a programmer.

With hindsight, I suggest that you pick your fights with care. Use the bin versions of entire packages where available and enjoy the flexibility of USE when it will make a difference.

gcc is not the biggest lump you will compile but it does take a while. It was rather slower 20 years ago.

Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.

That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.

I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.

We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.

I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.

AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.

Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.

Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.

For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.

Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably

Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.

For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.

Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.

In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.