Calculate Linux: It's like Gentoo, but for businesses Linux distros come and go all the time, which tends to imply that anything that continues for years has something going for it. Calculate Linux isn't well known in the West but this is the 13th major release. Calculate Linux 23 appeared just three days before the end of last year so its version number – which indicates the …
Speaking as someone who struggled with the "throw you in at the deep end" approach 16 or 17 years ago, it can be worth persevering with for some people. I learned a lot about Linux that way, and I wouldn't put Gentoo on someone else's machine. Supporting relatives windows machines is bad enough, I'd hate to do that for Gentoo for someone as inexperienced with it as I was when I first started! I'd never give Gentoo up though. (There is a very appropriate XKCD for Gentoo, by the way, but I don't have time to find it for you because I need to go and re-compile my kernel....)
At work we have a "slowly being phased out" internal distro which once upon a time started as Gentoo. Way back when as a slight aside from that I did install Gentoo on a VM at home to have a play and it was somewhat enlightening how bare bones a Linux can be.
But time has moved on and at work it's morphed from a small, fast, lightweight distro which did one thing well, to a porky and time consuming pain in the bum which requires excessive hand-holding to do anything and is not exactly dependency friendly when it comes to some software we'd like to use. Intersting while it lasted, but replacing it with RHEL will make our lives much easier.
Until Red Hat pulls another rug out from under again.
I'm no great fan of Canonical either, but these days I'd have to think hard about running Ubuntu instead of RHEL at work, if I have to choose something with corporate ownership.
Of course at home, for the stuff I actually care about, it's FreeBSD and Debian.
Sanctions and export restrictions against Russia were piling up well before the current war (er, sorry, "Special Military Operation") started. All the SMO did was go from gently boiling the frog to turning the heat up to eleven, I suppose the logic being it was going to get there anyway so why wait?
I should insert the obligatory anti-Windows stuff in here as well but we all know the drill. Its personal, though -- I would like to buy a new PC, this one being rather old, but I'm reluctant to get either a modern PC or Mac so I'm stuck with the older system running Mint. This system also boots to Win10 -- I need W for a couple of programs -- and the difference in performance is night and day. I don't know what MS wants with all those extra resources and cycles but based on what happens on my phone and tablet its probably 'analytics' -- spyware to you or me. Even the venerable Chrome browser's become a bit of a dog in the Linux version (its a given under Windows), its got some insatiable curiosity about me and my machine and its constant upgrades seem cleverly designed to force you to use it if you want certain websites to work)(I just use it for the websites.....).
I really miss those old days with crude, functional, computers and software.
>All editions have the same desktop layout, with a GNOME 2-like panel at the top with a start menu, virtual desktop switcher and status icons, and a central dock at the bottom. This is a nice touch, which some other distros could usefully emulate.
This is certainly a good thing for the out-of-the-box experience (that is if you can install it :) ) However, I'm not so keen on central dock at the bottom; with a wide screen having the dock/taskbar vertically to one side is a better use of screen real-estate when most your work is with column text documents. (Who displays El Reg at full-screen width? but expect most will display it at full screen height...)
[Author here]
> I'm not so keen on central dock at the bottom
I totally agree, FWIW. But it is the macOS default, and sadly, a lot of people are too mentally inflexible to change.
Secondly, I think a factor is the same sort of person whose "filing system" is a desktop completely covered in icons. Some people have so many apps pinned, or permanently open, that they need all the space they can get for them to remain at visible size.
It's the same sort of syndrome as people who never bookmark anything and keep 500 tabs open in their browser, and then viciously complain about it when the browser restarts and doesn't re-open them all.
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