After convincing my employer to move away from MS office I can finally make the permanent switch away from windows.

I settled on pop_os for now since it supports hybrid Nvidia graphics out of the box and I am a noob.

Two questions:

  1. I used OneDrive, and especially the file on-demand (all files on server visible in explorer but only downloaded when needed) feature a lot. What cloud storage provider has the best Linux integration? I dabbled with NeXtCloUD but the Linux client is not great, especially the file on-demand implementation.

  2. What are best practices for managing apps? The last time I entertained the idea of switching, I ended up with applications installed from the snap store, flatpacks, some appimages, some through apt. It quickly gets confusing for me when I want a specific program but it, f.ex., is only distributed through the snap store. Is there a GUI (I know) way to see all applications, where they’re installed from, with an easy remove button? Akin to what windows offers?

  • @[email protected]OP
    3•7 months ago

    Thank you for the detailed reply.

    1. I’ve used onedriver previously, or rather I do use it on my backup machine. While it works well what I’m missing is a progress indication for the download of files, I occasionally work with bigger video files f.ex. Also an option to keep directories synced permanently to the device would be great. In OneDrive you can check a box in the context menu to ‘make files available offline’. It keeps the file/directory synced and available offline. This is again useful for bigger projects. I could of course move those to a temporary location on disk but I do like the set and forget nature of working in automatically synced directories.

    2. I assumed that’s best practice, thank you. What I find overwhelming is the amount of choice. Which is a general Linux “problem” I suppose. Yes, it’s possible and elegant to manage everything through the package manager and the default repos. But if I search for a specific program, like f.ex. a clipboard manager, I might just get recommended something that is not there. And all of a sudden I have an appimage. Or the nextcloud client for example, it’s on the flathub but only the appimage supports the above file on-demand feature.
      Btw, how can I be sure that software from the flathub is kept up to date? My understanding is that it’s often community maintained?

    • @[email protected]
      1•7 months ago

      how can I be sure that software from the flathub is kept up to date? My understanding is that it’s often community maintained?

      If it got the ownership verified then should be kept updated by original developers, like Kodi for example (see the blue checkmark).