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Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recen

Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux. Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless. It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.

Refreeze5224 1y ago
KDE Connect is a wonderful piece of software, and works on more than just KDE! Most distros are supported, I believe.
- mook 1y ago
  KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the feeling that it's really just people making stuff for themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to "win" in some fashion.
  - BoppreH 1y ago
    It's still limited by the features the OS supports. For example, on Windows you can't mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      If someone puts in the work, KDE Connect uses sshfs behind the scenes and sshfs is available for Windows. Don't know about licensing, though.
    - devinprater 1y ago
      Wow, you can mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly with it? That's just plain amazing!
      - 1718627440 1y ago
        You can mount anything WebDAV, Samba, NFS, or SSH accessible, so that doesn't strike me as something new or unexpected, but of course it's still useful.
kwanbix 1y ago
Double Commander is the best (actually Total Commander but that is for windows).
hebelehubele 1y ago
Are there any Linux laptops with very good (read: all day) battery life for software dev in an IDE?
- felixfurtak 1y ago
  Most laptops can become 'Linux Laptops'. You just install Linux. Battery life is often similar.
  - skylurk 1y ago
    With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
    - throw-the-towel 1y ago
      Can you share just what tinkering do you do on them?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- miohtama 1y ago
  Framework laptops are popular among Linux users
- amlib 1y ago
  The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it. In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance. Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....) Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
rockyj 1y ago
Ah Dolphin. Forced to use MacOS at work, most things do the job but man I miss Dolphin. I really wish I could run it on MacOS.
- ubercow13 1y ago
  You can build dolphin on macos using their Craft build tool. It works ok-ish.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  You can, I believe it's a build artifact if you go on KDE's Gitlab, or whatever, instance. Same thing for Windows. The Windows version doesn't have all of the same features as Linux, so I don't know how featureful it is for macOS.
apatheticonion 1y ago
I say this with love for Linux. Controversially, I don't think there is a file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer. MacOS finder is an actual joke. Gnome's files is a less feature-rich finder and Dolphin comes close but still lags behind Windows explorer IMO. I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for Linux
- BoppreH 1y ago
  That's fine, it's a very subjective choice. Here a few reasons why I preferred Dolphin: - Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without navigating into them). - Checksum validation under "properties". - Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent across navigation). - When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new folder". - Browsing SFTP drives natively. - Native Git integration. - Well integrated notifications for long operations. - Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like WinDirStat, but with circles.
  - GreenWatermelon 1y ago
    Also: - Press F4 to bring up a console that stays in sync with your window. Extremely powerful.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  What specifically in Windows file manager are you talking about? I quite like Gnome's Files but mostly I like MacOS 's column mode and which it were elsewhere. I think it depends on what tasks you reach to the file manager for though.
- xxs 1y ago
  > file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer. How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use). Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths) I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation. Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.
heavyset_go 1y ago
Set up Kate with some LSP clients and dig through the settings for stuff you'd use and you'll have a better Sublime Text replacement for when you don't want to break out an entire IDE to edit some text.

Refreeze5224 1y ago

KDE Connect is a wonderful piece of software, and works on more than just KDE! Most distros are supported, I believe.

mook 1y ago
KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the feeling that it's really just people making stuff for themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to "win" in some fashion.
- BoppreH 1y ago
  It's still limited by the features the OS supports. For example, on Windows you can't mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    If someone puts in the work, KDE Connect uses sshfs behind the scenes and sshfs is available for Windows. Don't know about licensing, though.
  - devinprater 1y ago
    Wow, you can mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly with it? That's just plain amazing!
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      You can mount anything WebDAV, Samba, NFS, or SSH accessible, so that doesn't strike me as something new or unexpected, but of course it's still useful.

kwanbix 1y ago

Double Commander is the best (actually Total Commander but that is for windows).

hebelehubele 1y ago

Are there any Linux laptops with very good (read: all day) battery life for software dev in an IDE?

felixfurtak 1y ago
Most laptops can become 'Linux Laptops'. You just install Linux. Battery life is often similar.
- skylurk 1y ago
  With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
  - throw-the-towel 1y ago
    Can you share just what tinkering do you do on them?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
miohtama 1y ago
Framework laptops are popular among Linux users
amlib 1y ago
The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it. In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance. Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....) Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.

rockyj 1y ago

Ah Dolphin. Forced to use MacOS at work, most things do the job but man I miss Dolphin. I really wish I could run it on MacOS.

ubercow13 1y ago
You can build dolphin on macos using their Craft build tool. It works ok-ish.
heavyset_go 1y ago
You can, I believe it's a build artifact if you go on KDE's Gitlab, or whatever, instance. Same thing for Windows. The Windows version doesn't have all of the same features as Linux, so I don't know how featureful it is for macOS.

apatheticonion 1y ago

I say this with love for Linux. Controversially, I don't think there is a file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer. MacOS finder is an actual joke. Gnome's files is a less feature-rich finder and Dolphin comes close but still lags behind Windows explorer IMO. I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for Linux

BoppreH 1y ago
That's fine, it's a very subjective choice. Here a few reasons why I preferred Dolphin: - Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without navigating into them). - Checksum validation under "properties". - Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent across navigation). - When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new folder". - Browsing SFTP drives natively. - Native Git integration. - Well integrated notifications for long operations. - Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like WinDirStat, but with circles.
- GreenWatermelon 1y ago
  Also: - Press F4 to bring up a console that stays in sync with your window. Extremely powerful.
fluidcruft 1y ago
What specifically in Windows file manager are you talking about? I quite like Gnome's Files but mostly I like MacOS 's column mode and which it were elsewhere. I think it depends on what tasks you reach to the file manager for though.
xxs 1y ago
> file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer. How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use). Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths) I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation. Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.

heavyset_go 1y ago

Set up Kate with some LSP clients and dig through the settings for stuff you'd use and you'll have a better Sublime Text replacement for when you don't want to break out an entire IDE to edit some text.