I don’t know every detail of your use cases, but my offline go to is xournal++ (xournalpp).

I use it for many of those actions. We moved to Germany and having a GUI pdf editor for signing, highlighting, redacting, pulling pages, etc has been invaluable.

My wife also uses it for her class lectures. She does math, so she uses a tablet to write on her slides (pdfs) live in class to talk through the material. Then, she saves the lecture PDF to give to students with the notes.

Highlight->Middle paste has been my friend for decades now. Using it from SunOS in the 90-s to now has been a great feature. It’s the quickest way to copy and paste while I’m working fast with text or data entry.

I love having both clipboards be functional. The latest rounds of tools that have stopped being as compatible with it has been no end of problems in my workflow. I’ll copy with the keyboard, highlight some text and then paste both clipboards somewhere else.

No, using the keyboard here isn’t as fast, don’t bother making that argument, especially since ctrl-c means different things in different places on Unix style systems. Left hand stays home row while the right is forced to leave for the mouse since it’s a GUI.

I’ve had to deal with many tools that don’t respect keyboard cut/paste as well. Add in that some tools like putty or git bash on windows have ctrl-ins for paste?

Panning in CAD/design is usually click and hold middle or even a two button system (freecad), so trying to take a middle click for that isn’t buying uniformity.

The copy/paste world is already fractured enough. Keep the highlight/middle click working so we can go fast. I might be a dinosaur, but I’m a fast dinosaur.

What? No way. I despise their captive scrolling stuff. Every time I get forced onto a windows system I forget that middle mouse is a weird scrolling mode and end up wandering randomly up and down pages until I realize what happened.

The biggest limitation on the older models is RAM. There’s other issues with network contention (the Ethernet is actually a USB device on the board), raw CPU (especially gen 1 boards), but really it’s all about the RAM.

I use these kinds of boards for more hardware/embedded kinds of situations. No GUI Linux machines will easily run in 200-400MB of RAM before you start spinning up additional services or tools.

If you’re really RAM blocked you can use a more stripped down Linux install or even hop to BSD and run real lean on resources for the OS. All of these options can still run most network services or simple build/dev kinds of support systems. They could be message queue servers, run GPIO-driven hardware systems, be sensor platforms, run DNS/DHCP/PiHole kinds of systems, be a speaker driver endpoint for a larger system, bong a clock sound every hour, or whatever. That’s just what I could come up with while typing on the fly. If you start adding hardware to the IO ports it just goes nuts what even the older boards are capable of.

I only do technical CAD design, so FreeCAD works fine. It’s no AutoDesk, but it has gotten good for my project scale.

Slicing is done with Cura.

Printing I’m mostly living off copying to SD card like a barbarian, but I’ve used Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi board in the past. I even had the time lapse camera videos working. It was a nice setup.

Some of my kids do more advanced sculpture work with Blender and other tools.

Fingers crossed we can find a few more episodes of Doctor Who as well. The cache of tapes found a few years ago at a TV station were a wonderful find.

Nothing but the basics that way!

The hardest core version I saw someone do that was long ago. My best friend and I were using OpenBSD back in early 2000’s. He installed a minimal install. From there he pulled the source tree makefiles. Then he started running make on Mozilla (pre firefox days). He just kept building, patching, fixing, and hammering away. Eventually he built the whole GUI environment, dependencies, and Mozilla which took that computer months to complete it all.

Today, he’s the lead engineer for a massive tech company.

The annoying younger sibling?

After a run of RedHat - Fedora - OpenBSD - OSX to about 2007, I gave Debian more of a try in the form of #! Linux. That was a great minimalist distro. Ever since then it’s just one Debian variant or another. It does the job with minimal fuss.

It really helps that I don’t push the hardware with shiny new equipment or need much in 3D drivers. Linux Mint on desktops, Debian servers, Ubuntu only for driver issues, Raspian/Armbian on SBCs.

I was handed a Windows laptop. I used it for a few weeks and then quietly just upgraded to a personal Linux machine. It’s been six months and no one cares. Fine with me.

That’d make a great switch to Linux billboard.

I snagged a Chromebook back in 2016 and used it for 9 years. It wasn’t speedy, but for small time browsing, terminal use (I rooted it and put a real Linux distro in there), and media watching it was just fine.

Again? It used to be called something else even further back.

It must be part of the “security through making it hard to search for online” strategy.

The real elites shall forever be the Plan9 group. There’s dozens of users! Dozens!

Having PERL be a shell style environment was hilariously slow. Entertaining, but slow.

I feel bad that I read that page in Chrome. I’m a failure of a techie.

Tomorrow I must atone by teaching more students terminal commands. Maybe using web API calls with cURL. Or get and some eviloverlord.com quotes?

“I tried switching to Hannah Montana Special Arch Edition and it wasn’t easy!” – Is it ever easy? I dunno, but computers are complex things so trying any new approach is expected to take work. Picking a weird, unsupported, and possibly out of date software package isn’t going to help the effort.

Yes. All surfing is between your client and the server running the web services.

The problem is that many many companies/developers used cloud services to host their websites. It’s where they out their computers/services that determine the reliance on the big hosting platforms or not. Your client really has no say in the matter.

I use the Internet all the time without cloud platforms, but it’s because I host tools on non cloud systems. Having Cloudflare or AWS down doesn’t affect my own tools because I’m not hosting them on those platforms.

“trust is” says marketing.

This post feels like a bot wrote it as pro Microsoft spam.

AWS is mostly built on AWS.

Yes, DNS started failing to properly fill name lookups. So, DynamoDB started failing. That started making security and other AWS services fail. Which in turn made higher level services fail.

It truly was a house of cards kind of moment.