Debian is good for this. Enjoy it while there is still 32-bit support though. Edit- do you have any swap configured?

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Also a thread here.

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Then there’s her resignation honours list…

I class myself as having similar experience to your friend having used Power Basic and Turbo Pascal mainly under DOS. I was able to use tkinter to produce some simple gui front-ends to produce dialogue boxes, process data and feed it to GnuPlot.

Is it people that want to switch away from Windows or switch to Linux?

In my case it was the former, having spent a lot of time on FreeBSD so in 2007 I bought a Macbook Pro running OSX 10.3. This gave me most of what I wanted and when I needed something Windows (XP) specific I installed a VM running under Parallels, then Virtual Box. I was able to run most of the open source software at that time such as Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird in preference to the Apple supplied apps.

I hate it when someone sends me a PDF form and tells me I can complete it using Acrobat (or whatever it’s called this week). Last one I successfully completed with the Firefox PDF ed.

I fail to understand how they ever ended up there in the first place. Maybe it makes sense for businesses but why put government stuff there when ultimately they may be subject to moderation at someone else’s whim.

Add the past government’s use of WhatsApp to this too so they can’t conveniently lose data when a device is replaced.

They run a full distro rather than the minimalist that Docker containers use. You can also use them to run gui apps but that needs a bit more work to configure. I run Google Chrome sandboxed this way.

If I’m running another Linux distro that will be happy under the host kernel then I use LXD (or Incus) containers. Otherwise it’s QEMU+KVM or occasionally Virtual Box.

Does it matter what front end it uses if the underlying environment is QEMU+KVM. Upvote for tha above.

Follow-up article

That was my point - there’s commercial support for those who require it and community distros for those who don’t. Personally my daily driver is Arch with a Cinnamon desktop.

Or you are free to install the Cinnamon desktop on any other distro.

I prefer mine to not look like Windows.

How Mega are IBM (Red Hat) and Canonical (Ubuntu) these days?

Is Blackberry Messenger still a thing?

Life before snap.