Nah. I already did that once and the mrchromebox.tech site even says not to buy a chromebook for Linux. It’s honestly not that great of an experience

Kinda outside my price range. And there’s probably no used devices yet.

For outlook replacement I suggest Thunderbird. I can’t help you find a music player. I know that ones with your requested feature set likely exist but the googling you will have to you yourself

Hmm. Okay so Music should be fairly manageble. Just have a local folder with your music in it and then sync it to your phone using Syncthing. Then you need to find a music player that you like and has the features that you want.

For Office Suite have a look at OnlyOffice. It’s pretty darn Microsoft Office compatible.

For 4. look at photoprism (https://www.photoprism.app/) it’s a self hosted photo management platform.

I don’t know about 5 though. It looks like the scansnap scanners are supported in Linux but I don’t know about batch scanning or evernote. This you will have to figure out yourself

My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small “sattelite” application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn’t have drivers for the scanner.

When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.

But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn’t update and screw everything up.

And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I’ve heard no complaints. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t break

I am now all-in on bcachefs. I don’t like btrfs, cause you still sometimes read about people loosing their data. I know that might happen with bcachefs too since it’s early days still but fuck it. I like the risk.

Filesystem level compression and encryption are so nice to have.

Yeah it’s alright. I’ve been using Tumbleweed on my Desktop PC for the last few months and I gotta say it’s mid. They do hard drive unlocking in Grub instead of in the initfs which means that only LUKS 1 and with that only the not-so-secure PDKDF is supported, instead of argon2id which is the modern KDF you want to use. This is a small and annoying oversight in the distros security which is why I will not be using it in the future

I think Snap has the potential to be better than Flatpak. It’s a real sandbox instead of the half-assed shit Flatpak has going on. The problem I have with Snap is that Canonical keeps the Server closed-source. I don’t want a centralized app store where Canonical can just choose to remove apps they don’t like. So as long as the Server is closed-source, I will stay on Flatpak