Professionally/commercially they’re MILES ahead of Red hat, Oracle, or Suse.

Personally/free they do weird removed that usually doesn’t seem make sense on its surface if you’re not getting paid to learn it.

Take snaps for example: flatpak/app image/whatever makes more sense if you only care nothing beyond getting/running the software; but in a professional setting where you need third party info for something like an sbom or some sort of industry compliancy, snaps make it easy.

and you spend your entire tenure trying to convert it into another language while simultaneously adding to the pile.

and now he’s a “philanthropist”

emphasis on the quotes since he’s put his wealth into a charity; like most of the utlra wealth do; to avoid taxes so now he’s legally required to spent 5% of it in philanthropy.

they were trying to make a windows alternative since microsoft was using their leverage w windows to make corel lose money and courts were doing little more than slapping microsoft on the wrist for doing it.

if that were all they touched, it would be fine; but i’ve lost track of the number of times i setup a linux system for newbies and got emergency phone calls that the install was broken only to discover that they clicked on some kde setting somewhere that they both forgot about and didn’t understand.

it’s sort of like people deleting the windows folder on a windows system because they don’t think that they use it.

If it’s you’re first install go with gnome since it’s intentionally simplified.

You WILL get lost in all of the customization options that are available in KDE and most xwindows environments if you have no experience w anything besides Windows or Mac

I’ve installed Gentoo, fedora and Debian on powerpc and Intel Macs a couple times in my past.

The Intel Macs were no more difficult than Windows machines and the powerpc Macs required an extra step for yaboot and time to fiddle with an of the services; but still not difficult.

use the user field parameter so that any volume can be mounted on demand.

google and nvidia both do.

i don’t know if it’s still true; but they gave their employees 2 computers where their workstations were usually linux and their laptops were either linux or mac if they were engineers. it was their choice to decide what to get; but they usually went along with whatever their peers where using; except for non-engineers who always wanted macs no matter what, even if their windows machines were newer and better by miles.

it’s an ordinary desktop; the screwiness is introduced by intel’s decision to remove ap capability from its recent drivers.

It’s not a laptop and the hardware is fully capable of ap mode support in it’s older iteration of drivers; Intel made the decision to remove that capability in the recent versions of the driver.

It’s not a laptop; it’s a mini desktop that I obtained to serve as a wifi router; storage server; firewall; VPN; media server; remote file storage; and my cat’s favorite warm napping surface.

the wifi nic is embedded on the motherboard and it was chosen since it included a high gain antenna; among other qualities.

Wifi works fine if you use it in ordinary client mode w full Linux support and the hardware is capable of fully supporting ap mode in older Linux kernels; it’s just that Intel decided remove higher speed ap mode support in the latest versions of the driver to force people to buy thier more expensive wifi nics.

it’s a pita every time something goes wrong; it works well most of the time, but it also REALLY sucks sometimes.

it’s horrible in more ways that you would expect and what other solutions exist with intel wifi hardware in ap mode on linux?

i wasn’t aware that you could use ndiswrapper on an access point; i’ll look into it.

UPDATE: googles says that you can’t do this because ndiswrapper uses windows drivers that don’t support ap mode.

intel won’t allow its linux drivers to work above wifi 4 speeds in ap mode, so i created a kvm virtual windows machine with pci pass through on the wifi nic plus ip masquerade and now i’m getting wifi 6 speeds in ap mode.

i was a starving college student with $20 to my name and a dead windows me desktop computer that had an entire semester’s worth of school work trapped inside of it.

i had read about linux before and saw that i could buy a couple of mandrake cd’s from a magazine at circuit city for $5 or borrow $169 from someone to buy a windows xp installation disk.

i bought the magazine; installed linux; and taught myself (with google’s help) how to copy all of my school work onto a usb drive. i finished those papers using the school’s computer laboratories; and then kept on using the linux installation from then on in 2002 until now.

did the hash sum of your downloaded image or iso match the distro’s hash sum?

here’s an example using my wifi card on my laptop; here i use lscpi and i’ve copy/pasted the stanza that pertains to the wifi card:

me@laptop:~$ lspci -v
[REMOVED]
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 01)
        DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wi-Fi 6(802.11ax) AX201 160MHz 2x2 [Harrison Peak]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 9
        Memory at 601d18c000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi
[REMOVED]

i can see that the driver name is iwlwifi and i can use that to look for related modules using lsmod:

me@laptop:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi               598016  1 iwlmvm
cfg80211             1318912  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211

now i know all of the module names and i can either google them to learn how to install them or i can continue further with the package manager on the installation to further backwards engineer it. (googling is faster).

as i mentioned earlier there are caveats: downstream distros tend to use a slightly older version of their base distros so you also need to make sure that you’re using the same version of the driver and kernel and adjust accordingly if it doesn’t start working right away.

yes, that will happen.

the live distro’s come included with a lot of preloaded driver/firmware that is not included with a regular installation for a myriad of reasons; but you can use lspci and lsmod from the live environment to identify the proper software you need to add to your regular installation to get that hardware working.