i very much prefer separate boxes, but i do have one dual boot system, and i let windows do it instead of grub. it sucks, basically booting windows up just to get the boot menu to switch to linux, but hey. it works. even survived an 8->11 'upgrade' intact.

I've had the same dual boot configuration since around 2018 and this never happens to me, yet I keep reading that it happens to others. I really wonder what I did differently.

It's funny that they have been doing the exact same for decades at this point.

Windows already fucked with the booloader when lilo was the default in every distro. They have no reason to learn, it's all part of the way.

Fixed it by blowing away the Windows partition.

That's how my dual booting experiment ended, as well.

It overwrote my luks master keys and that was the last straw. The bootloader installed to multiple data drives was just icing on the cake.

Was it BIOS or UEFI?

Me too, fam :(

5pm signals the end of my working day serving capitalism, but also i can go back to using FOSS

Double relief

Could be worse. This summer IT replaced all of our desktop mini PCs with Chromeboxes and ChromeOS. I don't even have privileges. Any software I would want to install would have to come from google play store and requires admin level privileges. I normally download the desktop app to play Spotify on my computer, but can't even do that. I can't even change the fucking desktop background. The ONLY software freedom I have is chrome extensions and even that is a walled garden of Google's making. Manifest v3 is going to make using my desktop nearly impossible compared to the freedom I have at home.

Honestly they could probably just take the damn thing out of my office at this point. I really only use it for documentation or continuing education so I could just use my personal laptop or go back to pen and paper for that. Anything else I would have done in my downtime at work can just wait until I get home.

I just recently had to roll my Nvidia drives back (on Linux) because Marvel Rivals and other games just would not work/stuttered like crazy. Glad I have the option, but annoyed I had to do it in the first place.

Sounds like your IT doesn't know how to properly orchestrate updates.

Best way to do it in a Windows enterprise environment that I've seen so far:

• 1 Week: Install in the background silently and finish when the machine reboots.
• After the week, 2 Days: Warn once that the machine will automatically reboot in 48 hours.
• 12 hours before forced reboot: Pop up a warning in the corner with the countdown before reboot. Options are reboot now or warn me again in X hours. If you dismiss it without selecting, it pops up again in an hour.

If your Windows machine hasn't rebooted in a week and a half, of course you're going to have performance issues. What, you expect devs to avoid memory leaks?

That all said, the amount of Windows sysadmins who haven't entirely given up on wrestling Microsoft's update bullshittery is shrinking every day.

My corpo windows laptop has 122 background processes running in task manager

People still out here not locking their screens?

Gotta teach em to lock their rig when they're not using it somehow.

Though I'm still a fan of the 'take a screen shot of the desktop and then remove the actual dekstop' approach.

... hrm... it probably wouldn't be that hard to make a version of 'hollywood' thats augmented by something like a cron job that just checks to see if its open or not, and reopens it if it isnt.

... the matrix has you ...

Theres no way I'd ever be able to install that with our prison lockdown laptops.

WSL was my gateway into Linux on my desktop. It's a real savior on my work laptop where I have to use Windows.

I have been managing with winboat for my office requirements.

I don't expect the office apps to continue supporting ltsc tbh, so hopefully it lasts long enough for you.

Windows does aggressive caching now but will clear that if the memory is needed so I often find the in use value to not be as useful of an indicator now.

I will say if that was a 4gb machine I don't expect it will run 11 that well, we now will only ok 16gb computers. Not just for windows, but chrome et al all have ridiculous memory usage now.

Interestingly, the web 365 apps seem to work on Linux Mint, but I've not used them extensively, or on another distro. I did a migration from Win10 to LM last autumn, and I was genuinely shocked to find that web Outlook and OneDrive work on Firefox on LM. Confirmed that web Excel and Word worked enough to allow display and editing of documents - not an extensive test, but definitely worth a look. Obviously, there are still differences between the web and desktop versions, but it might even be possible to run them under Wine, but I have not tried that, and woudn't expect it to go too well tbh.

This smelly smell…

A good pdf editor is what I'm still looking to replace withiht having to deal with Wine. If PDFxchange made a proper Linux port, I'd buy a new license and migrate from windows.

Onenote is something id like a better replacement to because I hate it, but I haven't found a replacement despite trying several of the options. PDFxchange could be my replacement for that though if it was ported.

Whipper is supposed to be (almost) as paranoid as EAC? Its been years, so my memory might be faulty.

Have you tried ABCDE? It's cli, but once you get used to it, it's perfect for ripping AudioCDs in bulk.

Finally got around to testing out EAC on WINE (prompted by my previous comment a few hours ago).

It seems to work without major issues on WINE 11 in a 32-bit prefix (at least on LMDE 7). Plugins need dotnet20 and dotnet48 installed, otherwise only the in-built AccurateRip meta engine shows up. I've only tested ripping to WAVE and FLAC, though.

In short, I'd say it's worth a try now.

I just use K3B to rip audio CDs. In particularly tricky places, I use cdparanoia and the FLAC encoder on command line. MusicBrainz Picard to fix the metadata. ffmpeg on command line to convert the FLAC albums to MP3 or other formats.

Doesn't it work under Wine too now?

Not yet