Many years ago at work, when PCs started to spread, I taught a 60 years old lady how to use one. She never saw a PC before yet she learned pretty well, and I saw much younger people not learning.

Being willing to learn doesn’t depend on age, it’s a mindset, either you have it or you don’t, and if you do have it, it will last your entire life.

OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise

I’ve been working for big enterprises for many years, SUSE is used in enterprise environment to run SAP systems because it’s recommended by SAP, OpenSuse has nothing to do with that.

LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)

True, it’s the desktop manager that can make a difference but you can install any DE on any distro.

What are corporate users using?

Windows on PCs, Linux is used mostly only on servers (RedHat/SuSe), hardware brands are usually HP, Dell and Lenovo.

I think that is my standard

Why? Do you expect companies to ask you to use your own PC for work instead of providing the tools you need? Be wary of those who do, using whatever personal PC for company work can lead to data breaches and that’s a very serious problem.

You can argue that copyright law should be revised.

It already has been, there is a ruling that allows an exemption to copyright law for the specific use of preservation by libraries and museums.

Maybe they could do more about it but what’s already there is way way better than nothing.

It’s not only the game industry unfortunately, it’s every industry everywhere.

It’s public trading - and all the financial speculations around it - that ruins companies, forcing them to earn more and spend less year after year, and when they have nothing else left to cut, they start cutting the workforce, with all the bad repercussions Swen described, like loss of institutional knowledge for example.

It’s a financial model that’s totally unsustainable, noone can grow indefinitely, they should change the way companies are valued, not looking at quarterly profits but a number of other parameters like respect for the environment for example, security, financial stability, things like that.

It won’t happen tho so the only option today to be a good company is avoiding public trading, not many entrepreneurs are smart enough, or unselfish enough, to do it.

she didn’t really want to switch to Win 11

On which computer? Her own?

Does not the company provide a PC with the tools needed? If yes, she has no right to decide what goes on it, the company does and she should respect that, doing what you want on a company PC can get you in serious trouble, way more serious than finding out you’re using a pirated version of Office.

If the company expects her to use her own PC, they should at least provide the needed software licenses, Office365 can be used on the web, no need to install anything and it can be used on Linux no problem.

BUT the serious problem remains of having company data on her own PC, the best thing to do in such a case would be creating a VM, encrypting the file system and keeping all company data contained inside the VM.

Tho in such a case I would change company, no serious company today would expect employees to keep company data freely on whatever personal PC, that could lead to data breaches, I would never want to be involved in case like that, tho I live in EU, we have very strict laws about data integrity and privacy, dunno about other countries.

I didn’t add which GPU I have but I saw you asking in other posts so: currently NVIDIA 4070 with proprietary drivers.

I’ve been using NVIDIA on my Linux desktop for over a decade, it always worked very well tho you have to install proprietary drivers (opensource ones are not good enough if you use software that requires performance), Linux MX has a script (menu item) to install them, very easy.

In all this time, only a couple of times I had serious problems with a kernel update (something that can happen with any distro), but Linux MX always keeps boot entries for the last 3 kernels so when it happened I just booted with a previous one and waited a few days for devs to fix it (no tinkering on my part required).

NVIDIA cards have problems on laptops, those I only buy Intel, but a dedicated card on desktop is good.

Yeah Lutris has fantastic scripts that do everything for you, also the Steam store is really good even if you don’t buy from them, checking that a game is verified for Steam Deck is a guarantee it will work on any other Linux PC.

Debain (alt Linux Mint DE) Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games

I don’t use Davinci Resolve but I do play videogames, I build my own desktop for it and I use Linux MX (Debian), it’s rock solid.

“Ancient packages” are not a problem with backports, there are also flatpacks if some backports are not enough for you, or DEB packages directly from software developers (I manually install a couple of those).

The only games you will have problems with are those implementing invasive DRM, but that’s not a “Debian” problem, Linux in general doesn’t support that kind of DRM (not yet at least), tho I personally don’t mind since I think DRM is stupid and I’ve always tried to avoid it.

only the “free” product was downloaded and their sales folks essentially accused us of lying about using it for corporate use

According to Virtualbox site:

This VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License governs your access to and use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack. It does not apply to the VirtualBox base package and/or its source code, which are licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License “GPL”

Extension Packs are also free to download, are you sure a pack wasn’t downloaded as well? Oracle salesmen would have no ground otherwise (Virtualbox itself is GPL 2)

That was on the kernel 6.1.0-18, I had it too, fixed several days ago, but in OP picture the kernel is 6.1.0-17, that one wasn’t affected.

What CA are you getting your certificates from?

If Let’s Encrypt, have you checked their alternative methods to certbot?

I use Linux MX on my gaming desktop and LMDE on my laptop. I also have an encrypted LMDE VM that I use for some working stuff, since I have to use Windows on my company PC (but we’re allowed to have Virtualbox on it).

The desktop is pretty new, I built it a month ago after almost 10 years, it’s i9 and rtx 4070. The laptop is several years old (HP spectre), but since the previous one gave me so many headaches with nvidia optimus, I decided to go full Intel, I’m happy I did because I had no problems with it whatsoever, Intel only on laptops for me going on.

I never had to touch anything in uBlock Origin, not even once, I just have to remember to check for updates every now and then. I see some people saying sometimes they still get ads on youtube, not sure if it’s youtube testing new targeting, but I’ve never seen ads on YT anyway, I guess I’m not interesting enough to them XD

Regulating doesn’t mean blocking, AI needs to be regulated, it should have been already done, look at stuff like deep fakes, some done even with dead people, fakes with actors faces and voices without their consent, and so on, it’s not just about training, it’s also about how the results are effectively used.

And the fact the training is expensive doesn’t mean everyone should have free reign about it, especially when noone cares about the reliability of the datasets they’re using, of the ethical aspects of it.

As for reddit, we’ve been already shafted, that’s why we’re on lemmy now.

On our company PCs we have both Edge and Chrome, after the latest Windows update a few days ago, every time I try to set Chrome as default browser, a window pops up saying something on the lines of “are you sure? please try out the fabulous Edge first, you might change your mind”.

That annoys me to no end, first we are in EU, where Microsoft has been fined in the past for not allowing a browser choice, second, we’re talking about Windows ENTERPRISE !!, keep that shit out of it, policies on PCs are decided at enterprise level, you can’t spam users about it.

Appending reddit to google search has become the only way to get meaningful search results, without it it’s a shitshow of clickbait garbage, I can’t imagine what it will become if it’s not allowed anymore to index reddit data.

I understand companies not wanting data to be scraped for AI training for free, it’s not only reddit according to the article, also news sites, I think it’s a legit concern.

I believe at this point governments should wake up and regulate the matter of AI training globally, leaving it to individual companies will only damage users all over the world.

I don’t think so.

I mean, when I was a kid, personal computers didn’t exist, we used to play some tabletops but they’ve never been my favorite form of entertainment, I find them too slow.

That’s not to say I would never do it, if I’m in a group of friends and they all want to play it (so far it’s been usually Risiko), I would join them, but I wouldn’t look for it on purpose.