Lemmy is quite good at not being too "tribal". Why not embrace a message as expressed, instead of worrying about where it is ... posted?
For me, one of the worst issues affecting t'internets is tribalism. Us humans are hardwired to go all in on tribal affiliation. It is generally harder to find inclusive measures than it is to find exclusive measures.
If you are here then you may not be exclusively: Firefox user ⊆browser user ⊆human. Note that browser user can have multiple browsers.
I run (one of three partners) a small IT company in the UK. I've always Linuxed since around 1998. After messing with RedHat, Mandrake, Yggdrasil and others I settled down and ran Gentoo for many years and then Arch for some more.
I'm gradually dumping the Windows servers and replacing with Linux based beasties. We are also in the throws of replacing VMware with Proxmox.
I also have a pretty decent Kbuntu based desktop/laptop effort. I've done Windows client deployments in the 1000s so I have quite a good idea about compliance etc. An Ubuntu based box can run several AV solutions, secure boot and full disc encryption. Buzz words perhaps but also audit points and will get you over the line for Cyber Essentials Plus (UK).
Libre Office works for me and I used to teach office suites in the 90's! Things have moved on since but a decimal alignment stop is a decimal alignment stop today too (do you know what that means?). I run our Exchange system, and I migrated it from GroupWise back in the day because the kool kids "required" it. Anyway, Evolution with EWS will get you full functionality for a client but with far less faff.
I'm taking my time. I already have at least two employees who are dyed in the wool Windows officianados begging me to migrate them to Linux. I will but it takes time. For example - "drive mappings" or in English: Remote mounts.
CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ . This is an easy to add Windows compat thing. Its rather good. For static desktops its fine but for laptops that move around a lot it can be hard to get the file system mounts working again quickly in a dynamic environment.
CID uses a PAM mount based system and in the past I used another one (autofs I think). However it seems to me that mounts are not dynamic or responsive enough. In the end it is Samba and that might need some fettling as well.
As I said earlier, I'm taking my time (I'm an engineer) but be assured that Linux is quite capable of driving your desktop.
Bizarre article: "Recently, Linux-based firmware has emerged as a powerful alternative"
I have a stack of Dell OS9 switches in my computer room - they boot BSD. I have sold and set up Dell OS10 switches - they boot Debian ... on the control plane. To be fair they can run quite a few OS's on the control plane. On both, you can switch to a shell (BASH) and fiddle with Ansible and the like or you stick with the usual interface.
They are not glorified PCs! Frames and packets pass through some very fancy electronics and some very specialized memory (CAM - Content Addressable Memory) is employed for certain tasks. The manuals for these beasts run to 1500 pages.
I also have a large fleet of pfSense and VyOS routers and a Mikrotik or two and a slack handful of Fortiwotsits, oh and a Cisco thing or two and some others. pfSense is BSD and the rest are Linux. The Fortis are a bit more like modern switches with their own rather odd and twitchy way of doing things, backed up with some fancy and not so fancy hardware.
I have also played with all of the distros mentioned: Tomatoe/DD-WRT/OpenWRT and they are great for cheekying up a rather rubbish ISP provided router. They are also great for running on budget gear. They are basically superb for budget conscious consumers that are capable of reading some very decent docs. Prosumer is the term, I think.
Anyway, this article is rather odd and is basically filler. The section titled: "Case Studies and Real-World Examples" is a contender for fluff of the month.
A quick search comes up with "Phone Link" which only seems to work with Windows on the "PC" end, whereas KDE Connect will work everywhere that KDE works, which includes Windows.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/windows/sync-across-your-devices
It really isn't the same as Konnect which is a bloody marvel! I've used it for years.
9th Jan ...
"A hell of an improvement especially for the AMD EPYC servers"
Look closely at the stats in the headers of those three tables of test results. The NICs have different line speeds and the L3 cache sizes are different too. IPv4 and 6 for one and only IPv6 for the other.
Not exactly like for like!
How should someone who expresses an opinion - that receives downvotes - request feedback?
I've been a KDE lover since 2.0 or so. I recall compiling it from a tarball for a laugh and it mostly working, which was quite a surprise. I think I had Slackware installed at the time on my desktop and KDE 1.x on it.
Anyway, 23 or so years later ... I'm looking forward to 6. Things have changed a bit 8)
A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That's what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same "drive mappings" to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I've written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their ... issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.
I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that's another story.
A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:
I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: "Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs". FF has a slightly less opinionated "Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work". I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers
I've returned to FF after a very long time and I don't regret it at all. I run Arch actually!
I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)
I've seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I'm UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don't really innovate - they buy it.
Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.
If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn't do anything special for OWA it's just yet another Google browser.
The Fediverse is rather different. I'm sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.
Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I'm a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I've got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.
Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!
What are they?
I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.
I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.
I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have
As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.