There is also a release of VirtualBox that uses KVM.

Have an upvote. I use Edge on Linux every day for Outlook and Teams. I do not really use Office online to create my own docs but, if there is an attachment in an email, I use Office in the browser to view it. It all works well enough that I hardly think about it.

It used to be that Edge was the only browser that worked well for Teams. Ironically, with the latest update to Edge, my webcam stopped working. I loaded Teams in Firefox and it worked fine. There are other reports online of the same problem and Microsoft posted that they are working on a fix. So, Microsoft managed to break Teams compatibility in their own browser and it seems that Teams now works fine in Firefox. At least, it did for me.

I will not use a system with snap and has nothing to do with being proprietary.

One of the reasons that I could not use Ubuntu is that I cannot control using snap or not. They even use it to install apps that you install via apt.

The fact that the only time I did use a system with snap left me with the impression that it is an absolute performance pig certainly does not help.

I do not think it is about the royalties in most cases. I mean, RISC-V royalties may be the reason you choose it over ARM for a custom chips ( say in the bajillion SSDs you are going to ship ). Perhaps you were going to choose a different ISA for a microcontroller and the lack of license fee makes RISC-V attractive.

For chip maker, it is the freedom that matters as that is what “convenience” means to them. And it means less risk. Look at the Qualcomm / ARM lawsuits right now. That would not happen if Qualcomm had chosen ARM.

And if you are a chip maker licensing core designs, do you want your ISA to force you into a monopoly? ARM is more mature today but the role that ARM the company plays is being filled by multiple RISC-V suppliers ( HiFive, Milk-V, etc ). More players means more completion means more choice and probably better prices. ARM’s core business is licensing chip designs and they are about to have a lot of competition from RISC-C.

And in the end, competition from and within the RISC-V space will drive down prices for consumers. That is what consumers are going to care about. The lower prices will not really be because of lower license fees ( though that will help of course ). And it all comes with a large and open software ecosystem. So the “convenience” will be there too.

Why is ARM better suited for the consumer market?

I am torn on this chip. One way of looking at it is negative as they are adding custom instructions that are not part of the RISC-V standard. Part of me hates the fragmentation.

On the other hand, the alternative is that they release another MIPS chip ( MIPS ISA, not RISC-V ). That obviously fragments the CPU space even more and does nothing to drive the RISC-V space forward.

If I take a step back, this is exactly the freedom that RISC-V represents. Not only did it make sense for MIPS to adopt RISC-V over their own ISA but this is the kind of thing that would not be possible if they went with ARM.

What makes RISC-V better than ARM is the freedom, not the lack of licensing fees. I think this is an example of how RISC-V wins in the end.

Equivalent instructions will make it into the RISC-V spec ( official extensions ) and future MIPS chips will no doubt use the standard at some point.

In the end, this just creates more demand for and more support for RISC-V on Linux and Open Source RISC-V toolchains ( such as compilers ).

Anything that moves RISC-V forward is positive.

Wayland takes a lot of abuse but it is a great example of what is great about FOSS. Completely proprietary software could never abide that level of disruption.

If being driven by a minor player, it is just too hard and too risky. A commercial player with the economic dominance to pull it off would never see enough financial benefit to bother.

Take Windows. Even though modern Windows is from the “New Technology” branch of the Windows family, the security model was flawed with all users commonly running as Admin. Instead of really changing that, they have introduced a couple layers of duct tape ( eg. UAC ) but not fundamentally fixed it.

For governments, I think the priority should be exchange and archive formats. Regardless of what apps and platforms they use, I as a citizen should be able to read that data via free software. Govt should be able to read what I provide to them. Govt in the future should be able to access archives if they have moved to free software.

Next is the platform ( the OS and the web browser ). You can run your proprietary video editing on Linux. If demand on the scale of ALL European gov moved to Linux, I assure you that Linux versions of the software they need would exist ( even if still proprietary ). I use Outlook on Linux every day. I also use Teams ( usually on Edge ). RMS would hate me. But I only archive to AV1 and Opus, never HEVC and AAC. Most of what I use is FOSS.

Least important really is the apps. I have no problem with companies solving problems better than FOSS and getting paid for it. Even by gov. As above though, those that do not need the “better” version should be free to use something else. And the “default” ( for things like basic docs ) should be FOSS too. This is just not as important as the file formats and platforms.

CAD is a good example. Open Source CAD solutions are very basic even for “normal” users and it does make a difference. Proprietary still makes sense for CAD today even with the FreeCAD 1.0 release. My son and I did just design a keyboard though using all free tools ( including PCB ). So not impossible.

I feel like the multimedia production stuff is less compelling specifically as we are talking about government.

The number of government employees that need a DAW ( as a percentage ) has to be vanishingly small and could be handled as exceptions.

Video production feels like a great example of where proprietary software is probably holding things back.

The vast majority of govt employees that need to edit video have very basic needs and could be served by FOSS solutions. Today, a few need top professional apps and I agree they should have them. My guess though is that the real problem in govt today is that lots of people that could benefit from video editing capability have been denied the budget for those pro apps and so have no capability at all. A FOSS solution may dramatically improve govt ability to create modern media simply by virtue of being available to a wider array of users.

For governments, I think the priority should be exchange and archive formats. Regardless of what apps and platforms they use, I as a citizen should be able to read that data via free software. Govt should be able to read what I provide to them. Govt in the future should be able to access archives if they have moved to free software.

Next is the platform ( the OS and the web browser ). You can run your proprietary video editing on Linux. If demand on the scale of ALL European gov moved to Linux, I assure you that Linux versions of the software they need would exist ( even if still proprietary ). I use Outlook on Linux every day. I also use Teams ( usually on Edge ). RMS would hate me. But I only archive to AV1 and Opus, never HEVC and AAC. Most of what I use is FOSS.

Least important really is the apps. I have no problem with companies solving problems better than FOSS and getting paid for it. Even by gov. As above though, those that do not need the “better” version should be free to use something else. And the “default” ( for things like basic docs ) should be FOSS too. This is just not as important as the file formats and platforms.

Now they just need to let you run Distrobox in it.

This is for Azure. They care about it more than Windows these days.

These days, you also have the options of Flatpaks and Distrobox. Do not nearly as big a problem as previously. No need to build from source.

I mean, for most things, why even rely on EPEL when you can install something like Arch in Distrobox. A super stable base with totally up to date apps is a great combination.

I know pretty much everyone knows this but distros like Alma and Rocky give you a pretty much identical experience to RHEL for free.

And RHEL itself is free for individuals.

The biggest difference between Fedora and RHEL is that the packages in Fedora change far more frequently, are much more up to date, and are supported for a far shorter period of time.

Even more than Busybox, Alpine use MUSL. So, not very GNU at all.

Much more stable but much, much older packages at some point. Can you tolerate that?

It is a lot easier these days as Distrobox and Flatpak offer great escape hatches to get newer software when you really need it.

Some of us fiddle with the base OS more than we should. In many ways, I think using something that changes less often is a great idea.

One great thing about RHEL is the documentation. First Red Hat themselves make great stuff. Then there are mountains of third-party materials. Finally, since it changes slowly, whatever issues you are facing have probably been seen before by others and what you find about it on the Internet will still apply.

If you do try Haiku, use Falkon as the web browser. You will have a much better experience than the other Haiku browser options.

If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.

If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.

What do you think of Thunar? I know it is part of XFCE but I think it would fit in well on MATE.

MATE is a bit heavier than XFCE.

I don’t love the default XFCE look but the default in distros like EndeavourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.