I haven't felt restricted by linux in a very long time, and I've been using it for over a decade.
Heck, you can even create PDF forms entirely with Free Software, using LibreOffice / OpenOffice.
And don't forget PDF.JS of Firefox, which enables you to view and edit most PDF forms directly in your browser. However, it still has issues with some PDF documents, so I prefer Evince and Okular.
The still-common advice to install Adobe Acrobat Reader is outdated! And it has been outdated for years. In fact, some time ago the FSFE started a (still successful) campaign to convince public entities to no longer tell people to download Acrobat whenever they offer a PDF file. With public entities you can argue that they advertise Adobe without getting paid for that, that they ignore the fact that PDF is an Open Standard, and that they put the plethora of good PDF readers into disadvantage. Instead, most of these public entities now point to a community-driven overview of Free Software PDF readers:
https://pdfreaders.org/pdfreaders.en.html
But as mentioned before: As a Linux you don't need to worry about that, you almost certainly have already installed a good, free PDF viewer in the default installation.
Chromium possibly does it do, have not tested tho.
Although sometimes you can use Chrome (or evince, or okular), occasionally Adobe Reader is the only one that can fill forms properly.
I've had some success with running current Adobe Reader in wine but trying to print makes the program crash, so there you have it.
Atril is what Evince used to be before it regressed in usability.
The only hacking I did was to install libdvd-pkg or something like that.
I've run into some recent disks that I can't play, but never one that actually damaged my blu-ray drive.
Source? I don't even see how this could be possible.
Never mind that the BR spec has all kinds of weirdness, including things like bundled Java applets(?!).
All in all, its problems like these that keeps us torrenting.
I haven't really used the drive other than what I mentioned. I just grabbed the nearest DVD (disc 2 of 3 of season 7 of "The Big Bang Theory"), popped it in, and it just worked.
That was just a quick "test" to see how difficult it was nowadays to rip/encode DVDs (I haven't done that for probably eight years or so and it was a major PITA back then). I was planning on doing the same to most of our "media collection" so I'm hoping it continues to go well.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be looking more into this.
Several hundred AskUbuntu posts disagree with you. (And that's for Ubuntu...one of the friendly distros.)
Sure, things are much better, but I think most criticisms of linux not being "out of the box" ready are valid.
However it is faster/more expandable than most macs available today.
I keep hearing this, but I've never had an issue (Arch, Macbook Air 2013).
On the contrary, I have endless problems in macOS with WiFi where some networks won't work if I don't specify a DNS (I use Google's, but I assume that doesn't make a difference) - and others won't work if I do! (Meanwhile, other devices are fine doing the opposite.)
Never had a problem with macOS Wifi since 10.5.x.
But it's currently not the case that you can take an arbitrary Windows or Apple machine, install Linux and have a working Wifi. It's very much hit and miss.
The only trouble you may get is with cutting edge hardware because manufacturers are slow.
How do you expect a normal user to this?
Intel chipsets are OEM only. Cards are readily available on Amazon, but are all gray-market apparently.
In short, I don't expect normal users to do this, but I'd expect them to be willing to pay triple the normal markup on $20-$50 componens if they "just worked" in Linux.
To be clear, I'm talking about having an ODM run off copies of Intel/Atheros reference boards. The engineering effort is as low as it gets for hardware manufacturing.
There are problem devices out there, but more and more they're the exception, rather than the rule.
This is not true if you have Intel wifi hardware, which is a lot (a majority?) of laptops.
Is ndiswrapper still being developed?
It only supports Windows XP drivers and crashed the kernel when I tried to get my TL-WN8200ND (RTL8192CU) working with it on 64 bit Ubuntu 16.04
The ethernet controller is an Intel I219-LM (rev 31). The driver source that worked was https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/15817/Intel-Networ...
What I had hoped would happen during install was that the kernel would fall back to some simple driver, kinda like the simple VGA drivers, and then find the correct driver and install that.
I cannot understand people that think Ubuntu is on par with OSX and Windows for workstation use.
WiFi drivers are much less likely to work out-of-the-box; usually you need a firmware file which may require futzing with the windows driver installation package.
It works 100% reliably 100% of the time.
I had issues with OS X sometimes that I put the MacBook into a bag and it would get hotter and hotter because it didn't sleep and the air couldn't move, untill it panicked and shut itself down to not start burning.
Acer/Wistron laptop with MSFT DSDT would reset spontaneously instead of waking up from sleep.
I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.
Isn't distributing libdvdcss illegal in the US and therefore most distributions don't include it? So, most distributions don't come with full DVD playing capabilities out of the box.
For Fedora, it's a matter of adding the RPMFusion-nonfree repository, and installing a couple of packages.
As I recall, installing libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdread from the official repos solved that problem and allowed me to painlessly watch dvd's through players like VLC and MPlayer.
It's annoying, but better than when DVD support first appeared, and you'd end up compiling something like 5 libraries and a custom version of Xine.
Linux has another learning curve for me than products like Windows server, but i'm slowly getting used to it again.
These days i have very limited money to experiment with computer systems. So i turned an old desktop into an esx. Using linux for my vm's has been very rewarding. There is a ton of resources. Most of the stuff is free. The communities usually love to help you reach your goal.