På privaten har jeg allerede begynt å flytte vekk fra Google de siste månedene, og har nå alt over på lokal hardware og/eller europeiske alternativ. Kjører Linux på både laptop og stasjonær PC. På mobil er det mye vanskeligere. Har per nå iPhone, så vil tro Apple kan stenge den ned med et tastetrykk om de skulle få ordre om det. Er vel mulig å kjøpe Android telefon med åpen bootloader og installere custom ROM uten Google, men da kan man få trøbbel med bank apper og lignende så vidt jeg har sett. Banken min skriver på nettsidene at de ikke støtter “rootede” telefoner, noe som er merkelig når man kan bruke tjenestene deres på PC i hvilken som helst nettleser og alle PCer er “rootet”.

På jobb hadde det blitt fullstendig krise, vi er fullstendig avhengig OneDrive, Office, outlook og teams. Prøver å opprette filer i “åpne” filformat så langt som mulig, men er i praksis veldig ofte vanskelig å komme unna Office når jeg skal samarbeide med andre.

I also use Windows at work, and it is driving me insane. The updates can be annoying, but it is mostly just how fucking slow it is. Directories routinely take mulitple seconds to load, and I don’t understand why. I also just prefer Gnome in general, but I do think the Window’s user interface as a whole is pretty good when it works. I will say, WSL works well for the things I want to run “in linux”, and it integrates very nicely with VS Code.

I can actually install Linux if I want. They provide instructions for how to roll it in to Intune etc, and I will probably try it, but keep a dual boot to Windows available for when I really need it. The problem is that my job is married to Office, which doesn’t have native linux support at all. We ues OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and collaborative Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Most of these probably run okay enough in browser, but especially for big Word documents where we need to make sure formatting is okay (a nightmare in Word even without multiple users editing the document at once), I am not sure if it works well enough. Rclone can be used to sync to OneDrive. For now I just try to avoid making office documents whenever possible, sticking to markdown, latex and csv files etc., store as much as possible on our i.e. our GitLab instance instead, and hopefully it will it will be easier to switch over time.

I also wonder what would happen if Donny wakes up one day, decides he wants to invade Europe or something and all our Office 365 licenses suddenly stop working. We would have a lot of other bigger issues of course, so it’s not the most critical issue.

This is cool, but what actually made Valve do this? Are they just doing this for fun?

I actually switched back to Asahi on my M1 Macbook Air this weekend, and while it works well enough for me to stick to it for now, I would definitely not buy Apple Silicon hardware for Linux next time. I’m running Fedora Asahi Remix on Gnome with Wayland for reference. Fingerprint sensor isn’t working, microphone is “WIP” according to the feature table, etc. Battery life is significantly worse, especially standby, so if you use it for traveling a lot it’s not that great. I might boot back into MacOS if I bring it with me on vacation honestly. It is also not nearly as “smooth”. Scrolling stutters etc. Nothing that actually impacts the speed of what you do though. This is probably not an issue for most I would think, but for the Norwegian keyboard I had to manually edit the config to get access to the apostrophe: '. In general, it is a bit annoying that it has a different keyboard layout than every other computer I use.

There can be some compatibility issues, Discord isn’t or at least wasn’t running on Linux Arm, but there are 3rd party clients that do. Games are probably also not great, although I can’t say I have tested after the Vulkan update. Last time I went back to MacOS so I could play Balatro on vacation. Other than that I don’t really use that many apps on my laptop, and haven’t missed any.

Then there is a Gnome specific quirk: touchpad scrolling is way too fast, and it isn’t configurable in the settings. There are some “hacky” workarounds around, but they seem to be outdated and failed on me. For now I have just adjusted the scroll speed in my browser to like 20% of the default and it seems to work okay. You do kinda get used to it I guess. You can adjust scroll speed in KDE just fine, so if you prefer KDE that isn’t an issue.