So is the issue your co workers or is really that it bothers you so much?

Maybe the real thing here is you need to learn how to let the crazy and annoying wash over you. Because at the moment you’re letting that leak into your personal time - you’re thinking about things that are annoying you when really, why should they?

They’re “winning” not because they annoyed you at work, but because you’re letting it bother you when you’re not at work.

There are skills in being able to ignore things that annoy you, or learning to let things go or even compartmentalising parts of your life.

Then I’d definitely set up a test system in a VM on your own PC (I.e. not the actual server machines). Even if you don’t want to use Docker, you can set up a complete version of your new server and practice deploying Jellyfin and Plex, and then test accessing it “remotely” to manage it. You can then decide whether switching away from Win11 is worth it.

If you’re not familiar with the process of setting up a linux server then I’d actually suggest Debian instead of OpenSuSe. Looking at the Jellyfin guide for example it specifically covers the steps for installing directly onto a Debian host (while OpenSuSE set up means using the Fedora RPM guide). There are also straight forward guides for setting up a Debian server.

Personally I’m not a fan of Ubuntu (because of Canonical and Snap etc) but there may also be a good choice just because there are so many guides out there for setting up Ubuntu server.

Docker is pretty easy to use, and is easy to play with either on your own system (linux or windows) or in VM guest system. The learning curve isn’t that high and Jellyfin for example has a clear set up guide for docker on their wiki.

But radarr, sonarr etc can be installed directly within linux without docker. The Servarr wiki (that these projects use officially to share information as they’re so similar) has lots of straight forward guides for set up on Linux, Windows, Mac etc as well as Docker.

I have a Linux guest VM set up with a Radarr, Sonarr etc set up, VPN and torrent set up. It was easy to do and means its network activity is all securely contained away from my host system. The tools let me set naming rules and file preferences. The library is a shared n folder in my host system, and that is included in my Jellyfin library. So all I have to do is subscribe to something i am interested in and it will just appear in my library once downloaded. The servarr tools are extremely convenient and worth looking at if you’re adding to that 30tb library over time.

OpenSuSE is a good distro with nice tools like Yast that have a decent CLI interface, and has server releases. The leap edition is stable but relatively up to date.

But there are lots of viable alternatives, and if you’re going to use Docker then the host distro is probably not as important as you think.

Simplest route may be to set up a demo server within a VM and see which one chimes the most with your style of use and maintenance. You could have a functioning demo server with docker and deploy both jellyfin and Plex in 20mins.

The boost in support in the far right is concerning in Europe however it is also over reported and the media often fails to understand the political systems.

Most European countries have proportional representation.

In Germany AFD won 16% of the vote. They came joint second which made headlines but 16% is low. Worst case is they could conceivably join a coalition in a split Bundestag. But AFD are not currently realistically close to power.

In France, the far right was 33% of the vote, again making headlines and troubling. However that is in the first round. France has a second round where the 67% can coalesce around candidates. It’s troubling but the far right is not getting a majority in the French parliament, and it remains unlikely they would won the presidency as the left and centre out weigh them.

In the UK Reform is polling around the same level as the Conservatives at about 18%. In the UK’s system its first past the post so it looks like they’re get a few seats at most - literally 5 - put of 650 seats. The UK is looking very likely to elect a centre left party to power with a huge majority, mainly due to the implosion of the conservative party.

While these are all concerning and reflect lots of local trends, there is a huge difference with the US. In the US the republican party is viable for the presidency, the house and the senate and already hold the supreme court.

The US is in a far worse position than almost any European country when it comes to the extreme party being at the doors of power. Europe has much work to do, but the US is fucked because its much vaunted electoral system and constitution has been shown to be extremely weak and fatally flawed, and seems to be unfixable.

Atomic systems or rpm-ostree is an interesting concept and may well be the future of distributing linux, but it has a lot of compromises. It may not be the first place to start when leaving windows.

The problem is all the apps and things you may wish to do with your OS. Flatpak is the preferred method of installing apps as it doesn’t interfere with the OS, but that is a compromise that means more overhead for running apps including memory and disk space, and less integration with the host OS than traditional apps.

You can overlay native apps but the more you overlay onto the immutable os, the more complex upgrading gets and the risks of breaking stuff.

I’m not sure I would be starting with an immutable OS when switching away from windows. While it has a lot of theoretical benefits, its a work in progress and with significant compromises at the moment. Your VPN may just be the first of many programmes you find you need to overlay.

I personally would look at a more traditional install, get it working how you like and if you find Linux works as a permanent home then think about how you might recreate that with an immutable OS base. If your needs a re very simple then maybe it’ll be easy, but if you’re using lots of software and tools (particularly if its not available Flatpak) or custom OS config you may find atomic desktops are not yet quite ready for you.

It could be frustrating and off putting if you try linux immutable, find loads of problems and attribute that to linux when its actually the immutable OS that’s the cause.

I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

Oxford University is older than calculus.

That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.

And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?

AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.

AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.

Regardless of the supposed motivations, this is mass surveillance on a scale never seen before. The EU wants to become China 2.0.

Unless you’re specifically wanting to play with a different OS then Debian again. Makes much more sense to be using the same version of Linux and all the software ypu use rather than potentially different versions.

Also it will be simpler to maintain as everything is the same.

If you do want to play / test another distro then Mint has a low learning curve. FreeBSD is more different but you could easily try it and switch to something else if you don’t like it. Its different but not so much that linux users would feel totally lost.

Probably the most confusing thing for linux user trying FreeBSD is that Bash is not installed, and BSD uses sh instead by default. Bash can be easily installed and set as the default shell which will give a lot more familiarity. But otherwise it’ll feel like a familiar modern complete system, and you can use the same desktop environments you’re familiar with already in linux.

EDIT: You did say “backup” in your title. If that’s the main use case then definitely Debian again. If your laptop breaks or is stolen it makes sense to have a familiar system to pick up. Also important to sync and backup your data so it can be picked up on the other laptop. If backup machine is your focus then I’d say same OS and look more into data retention and retrieval between the two laptops, and ensure your important data is continuously backed up.

As a kid Amiga Workbench was my first desktop environment, and then later Win 3.11 in MS DOS.

I remember my dad toying with Linux but can’t remember which one (he did settle on SuSE though I recall). My first linux distros was Ubuntu.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

It kind of makes sense except the vast majority of software in all distros is not being packaged by the developers, its being packaged by volunteers in the relevant project. Most software is being used on trust that it is built off the original code and not interfered with.

Its very difficult for any distros to actually audit all the code of the software they are distributing. I imagine most time is spent making sure the packages work and don’t conflict with each other.

The verified tick is good in flatpaks but the “hide anything not verified” seems a little over the top to me. A warning is good but most software is used under trust in Linux - if you’re not building it yourself you don’t know you’re getting unadulterated software. And does this apply to all the shared libraries on flathub? Will thebwarn you if your software is using shared libraries that ate not verified?

And while Flatpak is a potential vector to a lot of machines if abused, it is also a sandboxed environment unlike the vast majority of software that comes from distros own repos.

Also given the nature of Flatpaks, any distros could host its own flatpaks but everyone seems to use flathub. If they’re not going to take on the responsibility of maintaining flathub and its software then their probably needs to be some way of “verifying” packages not coming directly from the developers. Otherwise users may lose put on the benefits of a shared distros agnostic library of software.

I get why mint are doing this but i think its a bit of a false reassurance. Although from mints point of view they would be able to take direct responsibility for the software they distribute in their own repos (as much as you can in a warrentyless “use as your own risk” system)

You can keep windows and install Linux next to it.

The best way would be to add a new ssd or m.2 card to your pc and install Linux on that. Make that the main boot device and Linux normally will detect Windows and give you a boot menu where you can chose between Linux and Windows each time you boot.

Alternatively you can resize the windows partition and install Linux onto free space on your main drive. This is more fiddly and things can go wrong with this if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You can also boot Linux on an external USB drive but this will be slower and may guge you a false impression of Linux. You can also try Linux in a virtual machine like Virtualbox but again this will be slower and will give you a false impression of Linux as a daily driver OS.

I personally run a dual boot system - I have two m.2 nvme drives, one with windows and one with Linux. I barely use the windows partition now but I keep it around for rare work stuff or the rare occasion I have a game I can’t get to run in Linux. And I mean rare - booted Windows maybe 3 times in last 6 months.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.

True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don’t own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.

GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?

PPAs are flawed and limited to the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem. They’re a security issue as you really need to trust to the person or group who has set up the PPA (yet many people just added PPAs for all sorts of random software based on a Google search). They need to be maintained which is variable depending on the size of the project and for developers they’re only a route to support part of the entire Linux ecosystem. They can also conflict with the main system provided packages and repost which can break entire systems or break upgrades (happened to me on Mint, and I needed to do a complete system reinstall to remove legacy package conflicts).

They’ve fallen out of fashion and rightly so.

There are other ways to get software to users. Arch has its AUR which is basically a huge open repo. OpenSuSE has its OBS which is also a huge open repo. These are also not without their risks as it’s hard to curate everything on such an expansive repo. However others can take over packages if the original developer stops updating them, and you can see how the package was built rathe than just download binaries which allays some security concerns. They are also centralised and integrated into the system, while PPAs are a bit of a free for all.

Flatpaks are a popular alternative now - essentially you download and run software which runs in a sandbox with its own dependencies. Flatpaks share their sandboxed dependencies but it does lead to some bloat as you’ll have system level libraries and separate Flatpak versions of the same libraries both installed and running at the same time. However it does mean software can be run on different systems without breaking the whole system if library dependencies don’t match. There are issues around signing though - flathub allows anyone to maintain software rather than insisting on the original devs doing so. That allows software to be in a Flatpak that might otherwise not happen but adds a potential security risk of bad actors packaging software or not keeping up to date. They do now have a verified tick in Flathub to show if a Flatpak is official.

Snap is the Canonical alternative to Flatpak - it’s controversial as it’s proprietary and arguably more cumbersome. The backend is closed source and in canonical control. Snaps are also different and for more than just desktop apps and can be used to in servers and other software stacks, while Flatpak is focused only on desktop apps. Canonical arr also forcing Ubuntu users to use it - for example Firefox only comes in a snap on Ubuntu now. It has similar fundamental issues around bloat. It has mostly the same benefits and issues as Flatpak, although Flatpaks are faster to startup.

Appimage are another alternative way to distribute software - they are basically an all-in-one image. You are essentially “mounting” the image and running the software inside. It includes all the libraries etc within the image and uses those instead of the local libraries. It does and can use local libraries too; the idea is to include specific libraries that are unlikely to be on most target systems. So again it has a bloat associated with it, and also security risks if the Appimage is running insecure older libraries. Appimage can be in a sandbox but doesn’t have to be, unlike Flatpak where sandboxing is mandatory - which is a security concern. Also Appimages are standalone and need to be manually updated individually while Flatpaks and Snaps are usually kept up to date via an update system.

I used to use PPAs when I was still using Ubuntu and Mint. Now I personally use Flatpak, and rarely Appimages, and occasionally apps from the OBS as I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. I don’t bother with snaps at all - that’s not to say they don’t have value but it’s not for me.

Edit: in terms of permissions, with Flatpak you can install Flatseal and manage software’s permissions and access per app. You can give software access to more locations including system level folders should you need to or all devices etc for example. I assume you can do the same with snap but I don’t know how.

Also you can of course build software form source so it runs natively , if you can’t find it in a repo. I’ve done that a few times - can be fiddly but can also be easy.