I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

Aww man, not Arco :(

Sad to see this, but glad the educational material is staying up for a while.

Hopefully some pieces of this are carried on and maintained/forked.

If it’s just for my own personal use, .odt

Otherwise I save it as a .docx

I used LibreOffice all through university. Wrote dozens of papers, did a bunch of presentations, collaborated with other students who were using MSOffice, never had any significant issues.

I’ve been using it for well over a decade since then at my job and for my side business and still it works great.

Watch some YouTube vids on how to customize the UI, you can make it look a little more modern and MSOffice-like if that will help your GF feel more comfortable using it.

Make sure to download to Microsoft Fonts on her system if she is planning on collaborating with other students, that way you don’t run into weird fonts compatibility issues when the other students are using Arial, Times New Roman, etc.

Yeah, and it’s free for a basic account + up to 100 devices, so plenty for most home lab needs.

Have you looked into Tailscale or an equivalent solution like Netbird?

You could set up a tailnet, create unique tags for each machine, add both machines to the tailnet, and then set up each machine’s network interface to only go through the tailnet.

Then you just use Tailscale’s ACLs with the tags to isolate those machines, making sure they can only talk to whatever central device(s) or services you want them to, but also stopping them from talking to or even seeing each other.

Cyb3rMaddy does more cyber security content, but she has a fair bit of Linux content too, same with LaurieWired.

VeronicaExplains is my favorite for pure Linux content.

I currently get paid in the bottom 15-20% for my role + experience in my region.

I received a “raise” (effective pay cut) a few weeks ago that was lower than the base inflation rate, dispite all the work I had done for the company and my great reputation with my prior manager and the employees there. (My company got bought out by a shitty competitor last year, the new management and policies suck)

So guess what? They are getting bottom 15% quality work, which is hardly anything. If they want to bring me up anywhere near the average wage in my area, I’ll start performing like it, but until then, I’m having fun bringing my personal laptop into work, playing RuneScape, watching YouTube, working on a side business, getting coffee constantly, and just roaming around “checking in with users.” Oh yeah, taking 1.5 hour lunches is fun too. 😈

Sea of thieves has been working on Linux for years, and really well. I regularly play it on both my Linux gaming rig and on my Steam Deck, it runs awesome on both.

Linux Mint OS, QBitTorrent for the client, Proton VPN for the VPN with qBitTorrent bound to only that interface and port to ensure no IP leaks.

Works Awesome.

As somebody who works in IT at a Windows-only environment, I know exactly what you mean.

I have to fight with Windows on a weekly basis. Driver issues, firmware issues, software crashes/lockups, performance issues, etc etc.

Just this week, I have two users experiencing issues with their monitors. Identical enterprise grade laptops, identical drivers, identical docking stations, all totally up to date on Windows 11. Their old Windows 10 computers worked fine. Still trying to figure out what’s wrong.

I play Lichess on my GrapheneOS Pixel6a, works well. Same with Signal, Firefox with several mobile browser extensions.

Bitwarden, NewPipe, Tailscale, Duolingo, Uber, Discord, Matrix Element, all the Proton mobile apps, Backblaze, etc etc.

Pretty much every app I try works flawlessly. On rare occasion I’ll experience minor bugs, and twice I’ve had to use GOS’s extra privilege mode to get an app to work.

Overall, Love GrapheneOS and I’ll use them as long as they are around and making an awesome alternative to Google’s garbage.

I’ve used two, NameCheap, and PorkBun.

Hated Namecheap, would never use them again. Janky pricing, tons of email spam, terrible UI.

Porkbun has been pretty great. Simple, solid prices, easy to use, no issues for about a year and a half.

Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.

Yeah, ironically Arch overall has been more stable for me than Fedora lol.

Debian of course is amazing.

Good point, I only a had a few AUR packages installed, so that probably made things more stable.

Yeah, not worth it to just have the command line unfortunately. 🫤

If I can find a solid job somewhere else, for sure.

Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.