wltr

Haven’t used one myself for years (close to a decade). Installed it for a relative about 5 years ago, never maintained it ever since.

What’s wrong with it?

It worked pretty well on an ancient PC which was running some Windows 7 if not XP. Can’t remember really. The relative is about 80 years old, so all he needs is a browser. So, Chrome OS came naturally. The hardest part was, for some really stupid reason Google wants Google account password to be entered upon booting, and not some other password. PIN code didn’t work for us for some reason. The solution I took is we changed the password to his birthday (perhaps with some A letter, if it wants at least one letter to be present). The password included dots, which was trivial to enter with a Numpad. Like A1945.09.05. But personally, I just hate it. There are use cases when you can allow a computer to have no password. Here, Google forced us to use less secure password, out of convenience. I’d prefer to have my Google account having stronger password, and forcing no password of my computer at all. The potential security risk is someone breaking into the house, and surely they’ll be very dumb to steal that computer, to have … what? YouTube history of some old fart? But that’s a bit of a different story anyway.

Me, I’d rather go with some very minimal distro and maybe even kiosk-mode browser, if necessary.

Still, what’s wrong with ChromeOS? Did I miss something important? Beyond Google dropping ‘don’t be evil’ obviously.

Take a look at the immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue. It would install updates automatically, and has the ability to always rollback to a working version. I haven’t used it long enough to have version upgrades tested. Perhaps it asks for user input. These upgrades happen twice a year.

If I was doing that these days with my current skills, I’d install some minimal version of Arch Linux and probably would remote into it once in a while to update, or invent some simple script to do the updates unattended. The lesser the packages the easier the whole task.

Also, don’t forget there’s Chrome OS which you can install on a regular PC. (It was called Chrome OS Flex last time I did that for a relative.) It’s the easiest I can remember right now. That’s for situations when all they need is actually just a browser. For those cases Chrome OS shines.

Same, with one exception I don’t really like Debian. Ubuntu, I’m surprised it’s still around. I wonder who uses it, especially on a server.

I’m eyeballing NixOS. And Gentoo too. And I’m looking for excuse to try FreeBSD.

Does it work well? Do you have more to say, maybe a blog? It looks like I can get one as used on a local market, I might want to give it a try.

The last computer I bought (a couple of years back) was a decade old PC, the price was €10 or so. I needed to add RAM, SSD, and used it for a couple of years as a Fedora Workstation desktop. It was plenty powerful for most of my needs. I’m not too worried about it. I think I can survive on a machine like that.

Hey, it’s not a blue screen of death, is it? Nothing is fucked up there. Except some incompetent fucker using Ubuntu for no real reason.

I imagine an IT technician running around pressing keys on real physical keyboards connected to all machines, instead of connecting via ssh, or even using Ansible.

Otherwise they’re an easy target for some fines, I think. It’s rather they pay the licence and nobody cares the money is wasted. And funnelled to the US, instead of staying locally.

I used to run LibreELEC (a standalone Kodi with some very basic locked down Debian) on a Raspberry Pi 2B with 2 GB microSD card. Works very well running 1080P H264 content (version 1.2, version 1.1 does not run 1080P well) over LAN.

I upgraded the setup for Orange Pi PC One, as it allows to be less picky about what I download, and decodes H265. But even RPi2 is quite capable, especially when you need to loop one video, which you can encode as you like.

Saying that, it’s surprising someone would even consider running a full blown Ubuntu on it. To me, that’s a sign of a sheer incompetence. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon.

Yeah, I wonder will mpv run on its own, without any DE? At least we can run Kodi that way, but I guess at least some video players are able to run without any DE or even WM. If not all, but I’m not really sure on this.

Really great advice, was thinking of that myself recently. I’m considering making some GUI apps to address my terminal journeys. While I enjoy terminal, not everyone should.

My issue was that when run through XWayland, Krita would work only on the primary display (no concept of that in Wayland) with 0,0 coordinates. So, if I’m on a laptop, it would work only on the primary (laptop) screen, but not the external one. I have a script that reorganises my workspaces and makes the external display the primary one, then runs Krita. But it would never work on any other display, if I wanted to use that too, for some multi monitor setup.

I may want to try that again, perhaps that was some bug that was fixed. But I’m surely not going to use X instead of Wayland for Krita.

Last time I used it, it wasn’t ready for a Retina HiDPI screen (MacBooks since 2013), but I might want to double-check that. I remember the icons were pixelated. And I’m very sure it did not work on Wayland, which generates a bunch of weird bugs / issues for a multi-monitor setup. I never work with just one display. So, I can use it when I have to, but most times I prefer Gimp. Haven’t been opening Krita for over a year or so. Text editing is a gimp too. Apart from that, the interface wasn’t that bad as it is with Gimp, that’s for sure. Overall, I believe that’s actually a pretty nice program, Krita.

Hey, I tried it. Is it only themes in the settings, or should I do something else. The interface became a bit more aesthetically appealing, so a nice work on that regard. But my pain point is the panels and their very weird behaviour (like you do resize and they are too much all the time). I expect you cannot address that with a theme.

I’m going to keep it, so I may comment more some days / weeks later, if you will.

That looks much better, I’m going to try it, thanks for sharing!

Have you tried PhotoGIMP? The link is in the sibling comments. I wonder if the difference, my first time hearing of GMIC.

But their hands are shaking too much, so they aim, but at the wrong things. I wish any of them could find some UX designers. I forgot about the text editing in Krita, that was horrible indeed.

Design tools are getting better. I find Gimp usable with PhotoGIMP plugin, Inkscape being somewhat useable for basic svgs made for web (mostly icons), blender is great, but I don’t know it yet, so cannot comment properly. It’s getting there, just slowly. I made a bunch of one-task scripts with imagemagick and it’s a breeze! It’s very easy with any GPT. So it’s not that bad as it was a decade ago like.

The less options, the better for a new person to jump in. Modern Gnome is a DE I can recommend everyone. ‘It’s like Mac but simpler,’ I advertise it. I like it even as a pro user, though. But even if we, the pro users, couldn’t work with it, that’s okay. Many pro users hate modern Gnome, and use other environments. But having one with limited options and an opinionated design hurts nobody, and helps a lot. I can install it for an elderly parent or a friend, and they can use it without much assistance, as it’s not very far from their tablet or smartphone.