You missed a fun part of that story! The person who programmed it was a kid in the district at the time. They continued to hire him to come back and maintain it any time they had issues, which apparently was fairly rare.
And back in the 90s, before anybody knew anything about risk or "bus factor", that might've made sense. But it's no surprise that they paid a pretty penny for an actual support contract after decommissioning that system.
Cinnamon is cool and all but I prefer KDE Plasma. It seems to eliminate all the pain points Linux desktop environments typically have and everything just works. Pair it with Debian and you got a solid system.
A KDE dev mentioned on a podcast that issues related to Debian Stable get closed automatically on their bug tracker because fixes don't get backported :/
My wife was complaining about Windows issues so I ended up installing Fedora with KDE on her laptop. I would have preferred Debian but using Testing (as suggested by the dev) doesn't some ideal.
Debian Testing isn't really unstable - the dev wasn't exaggerating. But I'd also suggest Kubuntu (you can remove snap and all of its packages, and install Firefox and Thunderbird .deb's from the Mozilla repo)
You're thinking of Unstable (Sid). It's also not like Arch or Tumbleweed because it gets locked down during release freeze and then gets a ton of updates all at once.
Markdown support and the like are useful but their need to cram AI and account sign-in into it definitely seemed over the top. When they got rid of Wordpad I kind of anticipated them trying to pivot Notepad more in that direction.
KVM/QEMU is the only logical and sane choice on Linux, unless some tooling you're using requires VirtualBox. The key is to optimize and tweak all your host and guest settings, installing the guest tools too. Once you have it optimized it purrs.
100%. I run this combo on my 12 year old Chromebook and it's a very solid web browsing and thin client system. Audio works, Wi-Fi works, Bluetooth works, everything just works, and works well.
It's interesting to think how incredibly clunky, unintuitive, difficult, unpleasant to the eye, and just generally painful the Linux desktop experience used to be. These days Linux has proved it's usefulness on the desktop, both to novices and power users alike. I have no doubt that 2030s will be the decade of the Linux desktop. Perhaps until 2038 anyway.
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