GNU Stow, backed up to a git repo.

For those who might not see the purpose, it’s for keeping your profiles on different machines in sync, especially if you use the terminal a lot.

We can choose what we want to run at work. I work as with Solution Architecture and Platform Engineering mainly with Azure, PaaS and dotnet solutions. It’s atypical I suppose but surprisingly seamless.

Doing this in Linux is pretty straightforward and my choice of distro is Ubuntu since last year. I have modified Gnome getting it sorta close to Omakub (the precursor to Omarchy).

The stack, including Dotnet, C#, PowerShell, Bicep, Terraform and Azure CLI works well. I’m midway in my setup of Neovim and have it working with PowerShell and Bicep as well as an assortment of other LSP’s. Additional tools such as JetBrains Rider, Draw.io and Obsidian with Excalidraw are native and so is LibreOffice. For the few workloads I can’t run natively (basically Visual Studio and Office) I have a VM.

The major issue I have found in a lot of workplaces with Windows since forever, disregarding the increasing mess in Windows 11, has been group policy lockdowns. IT tend to look at everyone including devs as office workers (assuming Office is the most advanced tools needed), meaning no admin access and blocked apps.

The whole site is kinda suspect.

This is the way we did things back in the day in manufacturing. Zebra printers connected to serial connections or via dumb terminals via serial ports being sent ZPL from OpenVMS based applications.

It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.

Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).

From a position of handling corporate data on a daily basis, I am pretty confident that data integrity is top of mind.

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

Zorin looks like a great starting-off point for normal (non-tech) people migrating from Windows. Visually it’s much more polished than Mint, based on Gnome and Ubuntu LTS.

Ubuntu LTS means it can also work in a corporate setting as it will get all the vendor support.

The Pro version is a bit of a bait-and-switch as I understand the only unique point is are the skins that give you Window 11 and MacOS look-alike themes. All the rest seems to be an open source software bundle. For Windows (or Mac) users the price isn’t really a negative and can be smart marketing.

For all of us used to the common Linux DE’s, dabble or dive into Arch, do heavy gaming? We aren’t the target audience. And that’s fine.

I know at least one person who has had a couple of false starts with migrating to Linux, is now on Zorin and thinks Zorin is much more polished looking than Mint.

Recompiling and replacing libraries was a thing back then - linux had it’s own flavor of ”DLL hell”. I broke a Debian install trying to get an IDE for Mono running by overriding and replacing quite a lot of shared libraries.

That being said I didn’t fully know what I was doing when I started off and the package manager kept warning me.

”You can’t trust free software”

As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.

I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.

I agree, the article is in the uncanny valley where it just feels off. If it weren’t for AI slop, I would call it clickbait.

As with many of these questions, it depends and it’s subjective. In my case I have a machine running Endevour to tinker with and dip my toes into Arch. The philosophy is different where you need to think more about where your packages come from and be able to validate them (especially the AUR). It’s fun to tinker and better understand the underpinnings and on this machine I have very little that I rely on working so am OK with the increased level of jank.

For work I need a system that I can rely on working like it did yesterday and last week as well as having wide support from vendors. For me that means Ubuntu LTS. In many cases there are tools and applications that I really don’t care about how they work internally, just that they can be easily installed and work in-depth.

Yupp, this is the public beta for 26.04 LTS.

To quote a quote in the article - ”Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement of intent for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.”

If it doesn’t work out at all, they will likely pull the change for 26.04. The LTS has after all a need to be stable as a lot of companies rely on it.

Take a look at Draw.io. It has an online mode, but also binary downloads for most operating systems (with everything saved locally).

I agree on your assessment of SketchUp - the old 2017 binary is still my go-to for woodworking design, even if it is a Windows install.

Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.