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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Ubuntu user here. Swapped away from Debian in its early days when Ubuntu made a real effort to stay current with the desktop environment (even coordinating their releases after GNOME), and back then it mattered. Nowadays my few attempts at other distros suggest that the hardware driver situation (especially proprietary) seems better on Ubuntu, for example to get everything working on fairly new laptops.

    There are of course other things I’m less happy about. The snap installs via apt drives me crazy; not that I necessarily hate the technology, but sometimes I need a non-containeraized browser (for example to run inside another container), so I need to be allowed to choose what is being installed.







  • As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).

    Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.

    The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.