KDE and Gnome are the most prominent and they "match" in the sense that they are mature environments that are quite usable. These have been in development for decades. For some reason, in the case of Windows, that doesn't mean much. I've never seen a Windows version with a buggy task bar but here comes Windows 11 with a task bar that forgets application icons (and replaces them with the generic application icon) and is generally sluggish to the feel, in my experience. Scrap my entire first sentence: it's Microsoft's turn to make an operating system as good as the competition.
There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.
It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.
It greeted me with a message: "Oh, I see you disabled JavaScript. Keep up the good work, my fellow cleanweb person!" which is an interesting departure from the usual "this app won't work without javascript". But I couldn't select the text from the message to paste it here... while looking at the header above it "Just let me select text" I thought: yeah!
I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely.
Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.
I recently upgraded my gaming PC from Win10 to Bazzite with Wayland, and my use cases are primarily streaming to a laptop and to a quest 3. I don't find these very niche use cases tbh. The challenge was, unfortunately, getting around Wayland. It may be a security feature, but to me it feels a bit like making a car safer by removing the wheels so you can't crash it.
It could ask for permission or let me whitelist applications like Steam, Sunshine and ALVR, but it doesn't. I ended up plugging a dongle into the HDMI port, so there's always a monitor "on" and it now works perfectly fine, but I would have been happier if I didn't have to do that, like Windows before it.
Maybe there are good reasons for Wayland to be the way it is, but my experience is that it's unnecessarily limited, it's in the way and "the rest" doesn't have these problem (Windows, Xorg, ...) so I'm not particularly fond of Wayland, even if it does a lot of things fine and it is quite stable (in my experience).
I've had wireguard in a container for a few years, and it's never failed me. I will say it took me a long time to get the firewall part of the configuration right but the configuration is otherwise simple. When I'm on the road I can access all the things I self host, which I don't have to expose anything of to the outside world.
It's not related to Gnome Boxes. It is an application that makes using Wine easier and more robust.
The statement means to say that it allows you to run Windows applications inside an isolated environment (a "bottle").
My favorite feature, especially considering the past of "heavily tied into Visual Studio" is the platform independent nature of (most of) "modern" dotnet. That is to say, I run Fedora on my laptop, and I do not want Windows, yet I don't feel like a second class citizen and dotnet runs well and is available from repositories that Microsoft provides for various Linux distributions (it just hit me how strange this is, for _Microsoft_ to offer official repositories for Linux operating systems...).
I also really like that its development is fairly open (it's on github).
From a more technical point of view, I think C# is a slightly better Java. A pretty nice language overall. It's not gui-or-nothing with dotnet core so it's not too difficult to create workflows for ci/cd pipelines, although the .net framework solutions we still have aren't too much harder to script: msbuild is pretty capable.
I work at a small web company (.net based, Netherlands) and we're just experimenting with it. We have a paid copilot subscription, but nothing about it is mandatory in any way.
But this place is conservative in the sense that self hosting is the norm and cloud services like Azure or even github (we self host Gitea) are not, other than MS 365 for Teams and e-mail.
In my first job, when .net didn't yet exist, xml + xslt was the templating engine we used for html and (html) e-mail and sometimes csv. I'd write queries in sql server using "for xml" and it would output all data needed for a page and feed it to an xsl template (all server side) which would output html. Microsoft had a caching xsl parser that would result in less than 10ms to load such a page. Up until we though "hey, let's start using xml namespaces, that sounds like a good idea!". Was a bit less fun after that!
Looking back it was a pretty good stack, and it would still work fine today imho. I never started disliking it, but after leaving that job I never wrote another stylesheet.
If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow.
The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
In case of Earth, Wikipedia describes [1] it as being "[..] generated by electric currents due to the motion of convection currents of a mixture of molten iron and nickel in Earth's outer core". This makes Earth a geodynamo [2]. (The aforementioned Wikipedia page is actually really long and detailed, a lot more than I would have thought)
They had their own startup sounds, too (at least the machines I have). And it wasn't just the machines; peripherals (mouse, keyboard, monitor) had this nice looking texture on them as well. They were definitely cool back in the days!
.Net has been (_almost_) entirely open source for years now. The whole closed source and Windows-bound .Net Framework is a legacy thing of the past now, since .Net Core (which is now named .Net) everything but the debugger is open source. It's all on GitHub. You can do all your C# development on Linux nowadays, too, with VSCode or Rider.
I love these work stations. Many (15+) years ago I used an Indy like a sort of dumb terminal, using X forwarding. It was very cool to use an application like a modern Firefox on such an old Unix installation even if it really ran remotely. It worked quite well remoting from a modern Ubuntu computer. I still have the Indy (and a small assortment of other old SGI machines, including 2 Indigo 2s), reviving these machines is on my bucket/todo list. This video sure makes me want to grab one (the Indigo mostly) and get all nerdy. Would love to see more!
> The only thing that comes close is .NET, and that's MICROS~1. On the timescales in my business that's not an option, they can't be trusted to not act like Oracle does and they are deeply ingrained into important libraries in that "ecosystem".
Many libraries and/or frameworks come from companies you could argue cannot be trusted (Meta, Google...) but do you shy away from anything they produce and stick to something developed independently somehow? In the case of .Net: it has been around for a long time, and it has changed drastically. It was closed source, Windows-only and it wasn't sleek. Then they rebooted the whole thing into .Net Core. Open source, platform independent, much thinner, development in the open.
> Some people claim .NET developer ergonomics on Linux are fine now, but those I know personally that tells me this are using VSCode, which I consider a rather shoddy piece of software.
My personal experiences with VSCode and the recent C# extensions have been fine for small projects, but if that's not your thing, there's also JetBrains' Rider, which I have very good experiences with as well.
> Maven is a turd, but a very solid one when you've figured out the XML incantation you need. I'm not sure what the alternatives are in .NET-land, or whether I can feel that I trust that they will work fine in ten years, like fifteen year old Maven projects tend to do.
The package manager aspect is Nuget in the .Net ecosystem. It's easier than Maven in the sense that you can control it from your IDE or from the command line, instead of having to edit your pom.xml or the .Net equivalent (which has one extra layer when compared to Maven; solutions containing projects).
> Java has Wildfly. What's the equivalent in .NET? Running a MICROS~1 Windows Server with IIS? That's not an option.
The equivalent in .Net is Kestrel, which is part of ASP.Net, and can run on Linux. It's a little less work to setup than Wildfly (which is not a lot of work either) because it's bundled.
> And so on and so on.
It's surely not for everyone but I think Microsoft has taken a great turn with it after the "reset". Is it going to be like this forever? I don't know, but looking at the past, at the direction Microsoft has taken it, I think it's gotten much better.
Of course, I wouldn't advocate rewriting your Java-based softwarescape into .Net (or the other way around) lightly, way too expensive and Java will probably get the job done.
I've done something similar before, though it was a client's database. They needed an empty copy of their database for a second instance of the software they were running, so I had the tool I was using create a massive DDL-script, then created the new database, selected it and ran the DDL-script in there. The script ran without errors, but all the tables in the original database were now empty. The script that was created by the tool started off with more than a screen full of comments, so I overlooked the "USING [original database]" statement that was the actual start of the script.
Because their backup strategy didn't work well, it took until late that night before the person responsible for backups managed to pull the most recent backup (from end of the day before) from tape which I could then restore.
My daily used distros are Fedora on my home laptop (x270) and Pop!_OS on my work laptop (t14). Also a hp microserver and an x230, both with Proxmox (Debian) and one gaming PC with Windows (I would love to migrate this to a Linux machine also but my Oculus Rift prevents this as they stopped supporting Linux early on).
They are in my experience, we do this as part of many of the courses and projects: they get an assignment followed by a 15-20 minute assessment of their work. Gives us the chance to measure their understanding of the work and it gives them the chance to clarify things that they didn't make clear in the work, which can lead to a slightly better grade.
As a teacher, my job is very satisfying, because it helps people in a useful and direct manner, and I get to contribute to the education developers get before they go out in the field. I learn much more now than I did working as a software developer, and for me it's a better way to be involved with the craft as opposed to just applying it myself for, ultimately, company profit.
There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.
It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.