Hawk

Yeah I hear that, good point.

Arch has great documentation but also a bit more config.

I would vote for Fedora over debian though. Debian packages are so far out of date that it becomes a pain and copr works quite well.

Well, I can only offer my experience.

I teach programming and Mathematics full-time and I've been doing so for the last few years. I must use 20 different machines every semester.

Every single time, windows users cannot install python, they cannot install latex, SQL etc. And of course every single time the machine is riddled with garbage and just opening the start menu takes seconds. It's probably more correlation than causation, but students on Linux always perform better In the course.

Mac Users certainly have it better but installing basic software (git, fish, ripgrep, neovim etc. ) is still quite challenging.

Much of the teaching staff have been using Linux for the past 5 to 20 years and probably have not relied on Windows since maybe 95/xp/2000 (my old supervisor started on Solaris apparently 🤷)

We sit there amazed that anybody would use this. It runs like shit, It's riddled with ads, installing software is painful, most software isn't packaged for it (exceptions being subscription-based software like Adobe), it's a privacy nightmare and of course you have to pay for the bloody thing.

I guess my point is, maybe you find Linux more difficult than Windows because you've been using Windows for the past 20 years and so you're approaching it from a different perspective.

From our perspective, we could go back to Windows and wouldn't struggle with the technical side of things too much, but there is no doubt that it's an inferior experience.

Tbf, this is more HP failing to support their hardware than a failure in Linux to be more flexible and performant.

Yeah as others have said, HP does not have a great reputation for laptops and stuff.

Grab a cheap ThinkPad, they usually work very well.

I started on Linux as a kid and let me tell you, being curious about windows, welp that's been horrific.

Curious in this case is a strong term, quite a few of my students are on Windows and that OS is a mess. I don't care much for apple but at least MacBooks work.

Phi3 is pretty good for the size of the model!

Also subs of the Microsoft libraries used to train models are quite good.

Oh and copilot, whether you like it or not, it's quite a technical achievement in terms of response time and accuracy.

Codestral and Yi:34b, are pretty good.

If it's just a server, Alpine and docker will do most things with good reliability and security.

Otherwise I've actually always used void and arch. While those aren't typical choices for a server, it shows that it's hard to go wrong.

Choose a distribution that appeals to you and it'll work great.

For this use case, alpine sounds good.

See also Inkscape.

Doesn't quite fit OPs want of self hosted, but still very good.

There is also Asymptote and tikz for more technical stuff.

I point your attention wolfballs.

I may not agree with most of the perspective, but the author's opposition to censorship is admirable.

Yeah free speech isn't always free, but I'd rather the freedom to read things I disagree with. Others may disagree though.

I'd like to know, DM me.

Self hosting is your pathway to a tech background.

University for comp sci, in my experience around the space, is a complete waste of time. Just a piece of paper that may or may not equip the recipient with some skills that may or may not be relevant.