In my early teens, I got really into computers, built my first PC when I was about 13, started learning Windows batch scripting and using GameMaker to make goofy PC games.

Along the way, I found Trinity Rescue Kit and was also introduced to Fedora Core by a nerdy guy who worked at my local YMCA.

I didn’t actually enjoy it too much back then, so I left it alone for years until about 5 years ago when I started to get back into the free software movement and related interests.

I’ve been 100% on Linux for about 4 years now and never looked back.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

Aww man, not Arco :(

Sad to see this, but glad the educational material is staying up for a while.

Hopefully some pieces of this are carried on and maintained/forked.

If it’s just for my own personal use, .odt

Otherwise I save it as a .docx

I used LibreOffice all through university. Wrote dozens of papers, did a bunch of presentations, collaborated with other students who were using MSOffice, never had any significant issues.

I’ve been using it for well over a decade since then at my job and for my side business and still it works great.

Watch some YouTube vids on how to customize the UI, you can make it look a little more modern and MSOffice-like if that will help your GF feel more comfortable using it.

Make sure to download to Microsoft Fonts on her system if she is planning on collaborating with other students, that way you don’t run into weird fonts compatibility issues when the other students are using Arial, Times New Roman, etc.

Yeah, and it’s free for a basic account + up to 100 devices, so plenty for most home lab needs.

Have you looked into Tailscale or an equivalent solution like Netbird?

You could set up a tailnet, create unique tags for each machine, add both machines to the tailnet, and then set up each machine’s network interface to only go through the tailnet.

Then you just use Tailscale’s ACLs with the tags to isolate those machines, making sure they can only talk to whatever central device(s) or services you want them to, but also stopping them from talking to or even seeing each other.

Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.