Can confirm. Do not recommend.

I tend to prefer to be the helper rather than the helped! Feeling part of a good team is important, and I had that for a while a couple of years back, but management spoilt it and destroyed what we had. I’m still in contact with some of those team-mates, but we’ve all left one way or another.

Everyone who uses O365 is pushed to use the web versions by the O365 ecosystem. When you click on Word/Excel/Outlook/whatever from your menu, it opens the web version; to use the locally installed app, you have to go to File/Open in Desktop or similar. The Open and Save dialogs default to using OneDrive - saving to local filesystem requires extra steps. The locally installed ones are becoming increasingly hard to use, by design, and the new features seem to be going into the web versions first and the local versions “eventually”. For example, the new excel “matrix” functions did not work in local excel the last time I tried to use them, though they might now, but there were a few features (special formatting I think) that only worked on the local version. Templates for word do not work on the web version.

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.

Can confirm. I used Linux and Unix almost exclusively for about 20 years, and when I more recently had to use Windoze again for work, this is pretty much what happened.

Collaboration can be good too, but on your own terms. Agree that knowing how things tick is a huge part of why I like doing things that way.

I mean there’s more to being autistic that just that kind of thing, but that does sound pretty close to my kinds of routines - arrived at through thoughtful trial and error. Self knowledge is always useful - especially learning what your “failure modes” might be (overstimulation, shutdowns, etc.) which can be really harmful if you don’t know what’s happening, and how to deal with it. I’m still learning a lot of that, but making progress at the moment.

Being allowed to do things my way, even if it makes no sense to others. I do lots of things differently to everyone else, because they work for me, and the people I live with are respectful of that. I’ve had to make lots of changes recently due to being in Autistic burnout, and that has resulted in me doing even more things “my way”. Sometimes, when I’m struggling with speaking, it means saying things very briefly - one or two words, like “tea?” instead of “do you want a cup of tea?” or “out” when I need to leave a shop because it’s overwhelming me. Other times, it’s just being allowed to do my grounding routines, like getting my breakfast in peace, because I get muddled or distracted if someone is hovering round me in the kitchen while I do it.

That’s masking, and it’s harmful to you - the energy you have to spend to maintain that will eventually lead to burnout. Speaking frombitter experience here. Your interlocutor has no such energy expenditure, so it’s easy for them.

Could be QOS or packet shaping going on at your ISP, or just throttling or congestion. Speed tests only really test for typical traffic patterns, so will give you a warped view: it certainly disagrees with your observed measurements. There are lots of factors that can affect how quickly traffic passes between two hosts on the internet, but domestic broadband is generally the worst of all worlds - you usually share bandwidth with other subscribers, and although the throughput can be quite good, the latency and error rate can be quite bad, and you can get fragmentation as frame sizes can differ between network segments, causing buffering especially when congestion is occurring. Your ISP might also have deprioritised your type of traffic, or they might be dropping packets, which causes retries, and thus slows your connection down.

The busies always make it worse.

Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990’s, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on “older” PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows…

Solidarity. You’re so right. It’s a wild ride, but I’m charting my symptoms, and they ARE improving - I hope the same is true for you. U had to make some big changes, cutting out energy drains, and then cut more and more. Self care is the most important thing in burnout, but learning what you need to do to provide yourself care is the hardest.

I’m in Autistic burnout… the slightest stress - just about any official letter, appointment with benefit agency or sometimes just something nasty on the news - can lead me straight into dissociation or shutdown. Occasionally, just having to concentrate hard can also wipe me out in a similar way. It usually takes at least a few days for me to recover.

I’m nearly 60, and this is new to me - I mean, I’ve had bouts before, but never as debilitating as this. I used to be able to cope with these things, even if they darkened my day.

Had to do some work with SuSE post Novell acquisition for a customer. IIRC the package manager is a bit odd, but I haven’t looked at it in what nearly 15 years, so I can’t really remember much about it. What I CAN remember involved running packet traces using Wireshark - it was mostly network problems, I think, so nothing to do with SuSE. It was certainly very popular in Europe, though I have no idea what they’re doing these days!

You never know … maybe THIS year!

The way windoze 11 is going - people really hating it - you never know, but I’m not holding my breath. Linux is still very niche, and people are wary of “strange” “new” things, especially FREE ones - where’s the catch? I’ve seen it surge and blossom over the years, but it’s still got a really tiny install base (as long as you don’t count Android and embedded tech, where the OS and kernel are largely irrelevant to the user). But I don’t see people moving over to Linux in droves any time soon, really: I’ve seen too much.

For context, I’ve been using it since [dredges up old memories] slackware was new, so about 1994, when a work colleague and I installed it (off about 20 floppies) onto an old 386sx PC with probably 4MB of RAM. Been using it ever since - and from Red Hat 4 onwards (about 1999) it’s been my only OS on my own computers. I’ve always preferred it, and I’ve seen it grow in so many ways - I’d still use it if it was illegal. I haven’t tried EVERY distro, but I have tried most. These days I mostly stick with Debian or Debian-based distro’s (I’m currently on Mint LMDE).

Don’t have any experience with this particular model, but I have found that with most printers on Mint you don’t have to “do” anything at all - if it’s on the network or plugged into the USB, the system will find it and install a driver automatically. I’ve used MANY printers with Linux over the years, and some were a right PITA to set up, but so far all the printers I’ve tried with mint have “just worked”. The only problem I’ve had recently was that when I updated to the Debian Trixie based LMDE 7, a bug in CUPS misconfigures EPSON ET2860 when automatically discovered, but it still works on stock Mint 22.3 without manual intervention. The fix is to manually add it, rather than accepting the auto discovered one, so it’s a problem with the discovery function, not drivers, and I suspect it’s due to some kind of quirk with this printer’s firmware that defines how it interacts to discovery queries on the local LAN.

Not only can you take loans against your shares, but you can pay the interest on those loans with dividends from the shares, and because they’re a loans, the cash-in-hand is not taxable, so you pay NO TAX on it. You have no “income” on paper, but you can pay people and companies with shares instead of money, shares that you can literally conjure into existence by typing numbers into a spreadsheet. Those money and shares are really useful for greasing the palms of politicians, government officials, and hangers-on so that you can get your way. You can even use this money and influence to cause riots and stoke division in society.

Yeah it was wild, but I suspect few orgs do things that way any more.

You mean in the context of high availability?

tl;dr: It’s to test if the cluster fail-over configuration is working properly.

So this was before things like Kubernetes or Terraform were a thing, so had to be done by the operating system itself. The simplest HA cluster is made of two nodes, one in “active node”, the other “passive”. The active node does all the work, and the passive node just keeps its data synchronised with the active node. I used to use DRBD for this, which is a system for copying writes to the active node over a network link to the passive node. That only gives you a “second, up-to-date copy” which is not that useful on its own - you also need a way to automatically switch over to using the passive node if the active one “dies”, and for that I used to use “heartbeat”, which simply passes packets back and forth between the two cluster members - ping-pong style - and if the passive node notices that the active node hasn’t sent its scheduled packet for, say, 10 seconds, it cuts it off the current active node (kills it), and promotes itself to the active role, thus preserving the service. Killing the “other node” is necessary to stop data corruption or user requests going to a node that can’t actually service them, and is called STONITH - Shoot The Other Node In The Head. STONITH can involve an electronically controlled switch, which literally cuts off power to the “other” node, or can isolate it on the network, by shutting down its network ports on the switch, or in a VM setup, sending a notification to the hypervisor to kill the VM.

The reason you need to be able to kill the kernel on the active node, is that when you manually shut down the active node, it automatically informs the passive node that it’s going down, known as an “orderly fail-over”, and you’re not actually testing if the heartbeat fail-over works, you’re just testing an orderly fail-over. Killing the active node’s kernel tests that the passive node is properly configured to take over during a catastrophic failure of the active node. You can watch the heartbeat status go from “up” to “down”, and then see the passive node decide to take over, promote itself and bring up its services, and begin processing requests.

To make sure it’s all working, you need to test orderly fail-overs first, from both nodes, then test disorderly fail-overs both ways, by using the kernel gun on the active node.

Things moved on from Heartbeat-based HA clusters to multimode clusters managed by Corosync and other software, enabling other strategies to be employed. This was eventually supplanted by “orchestration” systems like Kubernetes, and proprietary Virtual Cloud systems that move this functionality to the platform rather than the operating system.