Debian, KDE, KeePassXC, FreeTube, kdenlive, Audacity, GIMP, Krita, Blender, Geany, DeskFlow, RustDesk, F-Droid… just off the top of my head

FWIW I’ve got the wife happily running Debian + KDE on her (formerly win10) laptop and she absolutely loves it. I just helped her upgrade from bookworm 12 to trixie 13 and all went smoothly, solidifying her approval.

I intend to get a Fairphone 5 or 6 and test-drive Ubuntu Touch on it, hoping to daily drive it… but it’s all theoretical at this point. If I can’t get a real Linux distro to do everything I want reliably, Lineage OS is my fallback plan. I believe in the Fairphone mission, so that’ll be my next hardware purchase either way

I’m seeing a growing trend where a dev’s core repo moves to a new platform, but leaves a mirror on github with a link to the main repo. I love this solution.

No thanks; I’ll stick with LibreOffice.

(sorry, I just couldn’t resist…)

I’ve had no luck trying to get any semi-modern version FileMaker to run in WINE so far. I too came across that same win-apps solution recently. It looks promising, but I haven’t had a chance to build the underlying vm yet. Please dm me if you learn anything useful!

I rarely if ever see ZeroTier mentioned as a solution, but it’s a self-hostable encrypted virtual mesh network (with a small free tier for corp-hosted), super secure, and really easy to setup. I use ZTnet instead of the free-tier corp-hosted controller

AfterDark was awesome

Cool! Is there a public instance running anywhere for users to connect and check it out?

Something cool & useful? htop. Something cool but useless? cmatrix

There are also various text-based screensavers like the windows pipes and such, but I don’t have those project names handy.

Nice! DeskFlow seems like exactly what I was looking for as my Barrier replacement. I have an annoyance with Wayland where it won’t remember my preference to allow mouse/kb sharing, but more importantly IT WORKS, and better yet it’s an active project still. THANK YOU!

I’ll check it out, thanks!

RustDesk on Wayland can’t run headless, which I need (unless they fixed already and I just haven’t noticed yet - I know they’ve been working on it!)

Yeah, Input-leap is the Barriers fork I was referring to. I need it to work on all platforms though, and I wasn’t able to get it working on macOS. I keep checking periodically tho (usually in response to posts like these - I wanna move Wayland like everyone else!)

RustDesk (remote desktop control) and Barriers (KVM-like server to control my laptop screen from my desktop just by moving mouse to that screen). Both of these are tightly integrated in my daily workflow and would be a hard loss.

There’s a modern fork of Barriers but I haven’t been able to get it working cross-platform yet. I know RustDesk is actively working to complete wayland support, but it’s not quite there yet.

Jitsi Meet is a good foss choice for video conferencing in general, and includes a decent screen sharing function. You can try it out on the free to use (8x8 hosted, I think?) instance at https://meet.jit.si/

Heads up: that partocular instance now requires the host to be logged in to either a Google or Gihub account first, raising privacy concerns. that’s just how that instance is configured tho, to avoid abuse. it’s also self hostable and there should be other free instances available if you search for them.

edit: just noticed a few already mentioned this one (sorry, i must have scanned too quickly). fyi, Jitsi works well in combo with OBS virtual camera, allowing very precise control over exactly what audio and video you’re streaming

She replied, “For the horde!”

I just rebuilt my wife’s old Dell laptop (AMD with a super generic Intel on-board GPU). It’s now running Debian stable + KDE and WoW installed easily under Lutris (start with their Battle.net wizard). Diablo III runs as well, but with some weird grphical glitches. Wife thinks they’re cool tho, so I stopped trying to fix it. Anyway, WoW seems playable enough for her, though super crowded towns like Orgramar (sp?) occassionally crash the game.

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Doesn’t this timeline inevitably lead to “YOU WILL BE UPGRADED OR YOU WILL BE DELETED” ?

I’ve heard Bazzite mentioned repeatedly as a popular distro for Linux gaming (and I plan to test drive it on my old laptop soneday when I get around to it). My understanding is that it’s a standalone distro you can run locally, same as Debian/Arch/Ubuntu/etc. I suspect the “cloud native” marketing term in this context just means you can run the same image file in a vm, vps, bare metal, whatever.

If I’m dead wrong, hopefully my reply will be sufficiently inflammatory to trigger a correction, lol.