Not mutually exclusive, but it’s highly probable that if you’re running a mainstream distro, the default kernel is in lockdown mode, preventing hibernation while secure boot is enabled.

Thanks for clarifying, and I can appreciate your overall concerns as I face the same dilemma with my aging relatives.

Just to confirm, have you opened these files in Word yourself (or witnessed them being opened), to verify they are in fact valid documents? if valid, are they meant to be in English?

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen “other” files renamed with an incorrect file extension.

Assuming you meant “.docx files”, those should open without issue in LibreOffice. As others have said, OnlyOffice is another popular option if format preservation is a goal.

What do you mean when you say the files are “not supported” by the tools you’ve tried? What, exactly, is happening and what are you trying to accomplish? The end goal wasn’t clear to me from your post.

Getting Word to run under wine will require much more effort than copying the Word binary.

Looks great! I’ll definitely give this a try!

I’ve been very happy with both Silverblue and Kinoite. I’ve installed it to all of my workstations now and can’t imagine ever going back to a traditional distro.

Your comments suggest that you’re already aware of distros like Silverblue so, if I may ask, how are these different than what you’re looking for? Silverblue comes with several flatpaks installed, but you can easily remove these and you’ll be left with a pretty barebones ostree image.

If that’s one of those old 10" netbooks, I had good experiences running dwm and xmonad on mine back in the day (had an Acer and later an MSI Wind U120(?)). Typically ran all my apps maximized, one per desktop. Firefox did okay, but this was around 2010-2012. Mostly stuck with terminal apps and it was more than snappy enough.

Some screenshots from days past…

I would love to see an ostree-based (immutable) Debian for both stable and unstable.

Aside from that, my nitpicks aren’t distro-oriented.

I appreciate the writeup and that you’ve taken the time to post about it here, however I am 100% leery of managing remote access or credentials using closed source software. I’ll definitely keep an eye on the project, but it’s a hard pass for me until the app is fully open source.

I too like to review changes between images, but I’m just as content to run rpm-ostree status and/or rpm-ostree db diff to see what exactly has changed.

You should be forced to reboot though? And if you don’t want to reboot, can’t you just do an --apply-live?

I’m hoping to eliminate the extra reboot each day that is usually necessary to activate the latest image. I know that a lot of this will depend on exactly when the image drops from the repos (versus when I shutdown a host), which is why I was looking for some general feedback from others who might have done the same thing…I didn’t know if it’d be worthwhile in the long run, but I guess there’s only one way to find out. As for the --apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).

Thanks, yeah I’ve found a few articles already on running scripts at shutdown…something like this should do it (using Tony Walker’s update script), though I’ve not tested it yet:

/etc/systemd/system/silverblue-update-at-shutdown.service:

[Unit]
Description=Fedora Silverblue Update at Shutdown 
ConditionPathExists=/run/ostree-booted
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=shutdown.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/silverblue-update
TimeoutStartSec=0

[Install]
WantedBy=shutdown.target

I was an rxvt/urxvt fan for nearly 20 years, then Alacritty for a while. Nowadays, I just use gnome-terminal and I’ve been happy with it. Looking forward to trying Prompt though.

5 days later: Prompt is the bee’s knees! Highly recommend for anyone wanting a snappy, feature-rich GTK4 terminal, especially if you work with containers.

I can’t deny that the name’s connotation in internet culture is what turned me away from Fedora for many, many years. It is an unfortunate coincidence.

My vote is Fedora. It offers fresh yet stable packaging, and a polished experience that you can rely on. You can then use flatpaks for even newer apps, or opt to run Arch in a container with distrobox/toolbox and play with as many cutting edge apps as you want, all as if they were installed on the host.

Finally, if you like what you see in Fedora, consider trying Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of their other immutable distros.

Thanks for sharing these links! I’m glad to see so much consideration being put into a better solution.

The best and most official explanation I’ve read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.

Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.

It’s a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn’t address as much as I’d like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.

Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.

That’s good to know, thanks! I’m quite content with vanilla Silverblue, but I’ll take a look at their build files and see how they’re pulling it off.

While I’m a big fan of Vim, it’s definitely not for everyone.

I spend about half of my writing time in VSCodium, which is a community-based release of Microsoft’s open source VS Code editor. There are several markdown, grammar, and focus-oriented plugins for the platform, and you can pretty much shape it into whatever kind of editor you want.

I use VSCodium for the vast majority of my personal notes, technical writing, and project documentation (nearly all of which are written in markdown format).

Better south than north.

It seems that BT 5.3 in USB format is a challenge to find, let alone support under Linux. If 5.0 is acceptable, the TP Link UB500 uses an RTL8761B chipset which has been supported since around kernel 5.16.

I have a few UB500 and UB400 adapters and both have worked OOTB without issue under Fedora.

Not crazy at all. Came here to say the same thing. My vote would be to pick a distro that’ll let you focus on the schoolwork. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, or even just Linux Mint.