Ready to jump ship from Ubuntu

It was a few years ago in a computer magazine. I haven’t kept up with developments but Firefox is getting very regular updates (sometime a couple a month) so things may have swapped around?
Whatever, I’m avoiding Google ‘products’ whenever possible, first thing I did on new phone was switch off Chrome and set everything to use DuckDuckGo for Android (I also got grandsons tablet working with DDG as it no longer supports Chrome browser)

Hey Guys - so you are ready to jump ship? :grimacing: Guess I can say I have done that as I don’t use Dell with ubuntu 16LTS much except for it’s RAM in using Tails+Tor on a stick.
Went off using FFox whilst using Vista on HP laptop so with newer Dell and ubuntu started using Epiphany and Midori …

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web

… which I still use. Having now jumped ship to FSF recommended Trisquel on the old HP G60 laptop :slightly_smiling_face: this comes with FFox based browser ABrowser which I now mostly use and seems fine; works on most sites except GMX mail so use Midori for this purpose.
Yes - I know Trisquel is based on ubuntu 16.04 so keeping an eye on a minty flavor that could be ahead of the game.

Long story short : no I didn’t jump ship from Ubuntu, and I didn’t jump ship from using a Chromium derived browser - I actually use Google’s Chrome… it’s just too dang convenient! There are addons / extensions I use daily, some for my job…

It remembers all the stuff I can’t be arsed memorising, like literally hundreds of passwords for stuff I need, much of it for my job. I runs a Microsoft email client 10,000x better than the monolithic Win64 binary client from Redmond…

And Ubuntu is just too easy, and I can’t be arsed figuring out how to get Citrix ICA “receiver” and CheckPoint SNX VPN client working in anything else - both install and work “out of the box” (or damn close - with a bit of CLI woo), on 18.04.4 then continue to work after a “sudo do-release-upgrade -d” to 20.04. Microsoft Teams Preview is pretty much flawless on Ubuntu 18 and 20.

I need all this stuff for my job… and for the same reason, I’ll stick with reasonably “stock” google supported versions of Android on my handset…

I actually do run three browsers, all at the same time, Google Chrome, Firefox (whatever the latest is) and TOR (Firefox derived), because things like Outlook and Microsoft Teams are easier to run in separate browsers (not sandboxed or incognito mode) - e.g. I’ve got TWO Outlook and Teams environments, I’ve got TWO Service Now ticketing environments, I need to keep running on weekdays 9-5, and I DO NOT have to use Windows for anything these days… My work’s Windows 10 laptop is a mere single click in Remmina away, if I need it, but I rarely do.

Something I recently did, which went against the “grain”, was purchase MobaXterm from MobaTek (I believe they’re in France) - but it’s just too dang useful, and I use it for my job. It went against the grain, because it’s about 5x dearer than any Terminal client app I’ve paid for on Android or iOS (iPadOS) - AND - about 80-90% of it is just re-used code from Cygwin and PuTTY, but it’s kinda worth it - I’ve deployed it into about 10-15 different Windows servers I have to RDP (or Citrix) to, for my job - because I simply can’t be arsed learning to use PuTTY again, with MobaXterm, I fire up a BASH shell on Windows server, and from there I can “ssh-keygen”, “ssh-copy-id”, “sshpass”, etc, and even write a bash script, or a single line for loop, to login to 300 Linux / UNIX servers and find out how long they’ve been up, what kernel they’re running etc…

And the jury’s still out on whether I could use an RPi4 4GB or 8GB computer as my daily driver… things are still far from perfect, still too many holes, still not ready for prime time, many things run like a pig on it (the 8 GB model running 64 bit RaspbiOS).

I reckon I’ll replace my RPi3B running PiHole and OpenVPN with the 4 GB RPi4, and then also install Guacamole on it (look it up - pretty neat thing : basically a multiplexed terminal server/gateway to SSH, VNC and RDP to “stuff”, running those things with HTML5 through Apache Tomcat : https://guacamole.apache.org/) - but given my OpenVPN solution already works, would I even need Guacamole? Who knows, might be fun to setup (I did it, ran it, for a while in 2016, on a Pine64) again…

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Also - now running 20.04.1 on two of my systems… no complaints…

Noticed my desktop machine (AMD Phenom II X6 circa 2010/2011) was making horrible crackling noises when listening to audio through HDMI > LCD panel > Logitech 5.1 speakers > headphones…

Did a couple of searches - someone suggested update, so I did - I’m now running 20.04.1 and now the hideous crackling is gone, and I’ve now got about 10-15 dB more volume when cranking up Stone Sour’s latest album “Hydrograd” (fronted by Slipknot’s Corey Taylor) - VS the audio output on my USB 3 C-Media / Unitek Y-247A soundcard (didn’t try the motherboard audio out - because it’s a PITA to fiddle around behind the mini-tower) via headphones…

The best thing about 20.04.1 is that you can now update from 18.04.x to 20.04.1 with “sudo do-release-upgrade”, and omit the “-d” to force it…

I’ll hang back and leave my other 20.04 system as is for the time being… my work VPN client still works too!

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11.5?? :loudspeaker:

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