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.

I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.

Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.

If I recall correctly Arch has … ssh into wifey’s laptop … python installed out of the box.

Run up a console and type python, and hit enter. Type in print (“Hello World”) and hit enter. There you go!

If you lack a python: $ yay -S python.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to go from Linux to Windows?

Nightmare. The bloody thing keeps on wanting to peek up your skirt (even if you don’t wear one)

I usually do Arch myself these days and spent many years with Gentoo. So I’m not too terrified of breakage!

I am putting together a Linux distro strategy for my company. I am the MD of a very small IT company in the SW of England. I already have my office manager asking me to liberate her from Windows! I recently had a techie asking me to help his transition! This is organic stuff and not pushed down by me. The techie is a dyed in the wool Azure lover.

I am used to being patient. It took me roughly five years to get a helicopter company that I worked for back in the day (late 1990s) to use DHCP properly - ie let them “roam free” and let DDNS pin them down. Sounds a bit ridiculous until you encounter “enterprise” grade nonsense.

I have set up laptops with most of the usual suspects and tried them out. However, I have to comply with Cyber Essentials Plus which is a UK standard. It is fine but rather Windows n that 'centric. That means I need full disc encryption and anti virus (AV) and Secure Boot. I got away with ClamAV in the past but ideally I get cross platform and that means ESET for AV/web etc. I use the usual Linux FDE.

I also need to join an Active Directory until I have got rid of AD! Oh and there is Exchange.

https://cid-doc.github.io/ - AD and Evolution with the EWS addon for Exchange.

So I dive in with Kubuntu after trying Rawhide and all sorts. Ubuntu is flexible enough whilst being stable enough for me. For example, Kerberos is screwed for the Firefox snap. I need Kerb for auth to my corp websites such as our wiki. Mozilla does a PPA - I dump the built in FF snap and use the Mozilla blessed PPA. All documented and all controllable in an enterprise sense.

Closed In Directory (CID) is a configuration for Linux boxes joining into the MS world. Its a super piece of work, getting Samba, krb etc all working together well, and with a GUI. You can run scripts from your DC for that GPO feel with it.

My needs are a bit more corp than your gaming shenanigans but my notes might help you decide what you want, what you really (really) want (zigazig … ahhhh!)

Ubuntu PPAs are a bit like the AUR for Arch … well you have to decide what you really want. You could start from scratch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else’s money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That’s just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.