First, confirm if you can access Cockpit by going to the https://localhost:9090, If not, follow the Fedora instructions here: Having some familiarity with Command Line is essential. Your graphical package manager may or may not include Cockpit.

https://cockpit-project.org/running#fedora

Cockpit does sometimes allow you to install “plugins” from the web GUI, but in my experience (both on Debian and Arch), it doesn’t do it to well. If you can’t install plugins for 45 Drives file sharing plugin, you will need to do it manually:

For the 45 Drives plugin to enable sharing: https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-file-sharing (I believe it’s the “Direct from .rpm” section if you scroll down in the Readme)

From there, once you are logged into Cockpit on the left you will see a link for “File Sharing”

This isn’t as complex as it may seem as long as you follow their steps you should be golden.

I only use a Windows VM For our ancient (in computer terms) Canon LIDE 60 scanner which seems to work best there (linux produces highly grey contrasted scans).

For all of our scanned documents from the scanner, I have it mapped to a network drive via Samba Shares. Since you are using Fedora, I think you may already have Cockpit installed. This makes it a lot easier and is a web gui to manage servers. You can usually access it on your Desktop via https://localhost.9090 Then you would need to install 45 Drives File Sharing plugin and setup a SAMBA share.

From the Windows VM, just map to the same workgroup you set in the SAMBA Share you created and give it a drive ID such as F:

For terminal, the first thing I install is Midnight Commander - dual pane file manager. https://midnight-commander.org/

For all of my physical Linux machines - Cockpit and Cockpit-File Sharing plugin.

Desktop

• Thunderbird

• Firefox

• Vivaldi

• Gnome

• Chromium I use Firefox, wife uses Chromium and My WFH job I use Chrome. Vivaldi is a backup browser, I’ve been messing around with.

• QEMU/LibVirtd - So I can run a Windows VM for my old Canon Lide 60 scanner which scans clearly there, otherwise in Linux, it’s contrasted super grey for some reason.

• Kopia-UI - Backup system which supports NFS Shares - set and forget type of setup.

• VLC - Need I say more? Lol

• OnlyOffice - Better aesthetically IMHO than LibreOffice

• PDF Arranger - Works well to re-arrange pages or rotate them after scanning them in. (I self host Sterling PDF and will probably switch to that later)

And for some inspiration - the “Awesome Linux Software” list (Not mine) similar to the other Awesome lists you see around. https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software

In one way, I’m happy this is happening, in another way, I’m not - I’ve given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.

• You live by the time on your telephone, it’s your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don’t clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.

• If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your ‘talk time’ is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
  If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue.

• Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc…

Telemarketing

Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don’t meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.

TIPS

I don’t think I’ve encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.

One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren’t there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It’s a thankless job.

If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn’t always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.

Remember, if you can’t resolve an issue with a CSR, It’s not always that they don’t want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won’t budge.

Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!

ON THE OTHER HAND

If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it’s cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I’m in favor of it.

For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.

In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.

YAY!!! FINALLY! From the site:

"KWin’s “Active screen follows mouse” setting is now gone; now the active screen is always the one with the cursor on it, or the last one that was tapped with a touchscreen. This turns out to be much simpler and it’s what we think most people wanted anyway, hopefully alleviating complaints about OSDs and new windows opening on unexpected screens"

That was one of my most annoying issues, but learned to work around it. But on the rare occasion where I end up clicking and I don’t realize that my mouse was on the the other screen, this will be a huge improvement. (especially when I have my Always on top windows for my job)

For a totally different experience, and if you ever want to spin up a distro in a “container” there’s BlendOS https://blendos.co/

I’m an Arch user so I’m sort of staying where I am but am always open to ideas, so I tried Blend a while back. As said on this page for the distro: https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/

“In other words, you can install any package on the distro (RPM, DEB, etc.) while getting the immutability and update reliability as one would expect.”

That pretty much describes it and I recall, it did well. I also tried this one which is touted to be AI enhanced and feels more like they are making good progress: https://www.makululinux.com https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/new-makululinux-release-brings-ai-to-the-max-177104.html

To get the AI to the max, you need to pay a fee, but It’s all in the name of supporting development.

I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn’t support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.

With their recent drama, it’s been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)

https://getsol.us/

Several years back, I was 100% Windows based, and only knew Linux from the web hosting scene and running VPS Systems. I landed my current job which uses 100% Linux based OS’s on their customer’s equipment and software, Since then, I’ve gained a mountain of knowledge in the Linux admin and user space to feel comfortable enough to use it full time 100% in my household and administer it.

I think you would be surprised to see Linux more widespread out there, for example, a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian out in the wild mid reboot on signage or other displays, or being part of the brain boxes in industrial machinery. Then of course, - if you have an Android phone - well…that’s a form of Linux as well. :)

Well, there’s this if you want to use it in Linux, I’ve used it before, liked it well enough, but not paying for it so I removed it (It’s sort of crippled if run free). I personally use Konsole on KDE which works quite well. I’ve read and think that Konsole also allows multiple bookmarked connections. I haven’t really tested it myself, I have roughly 10 machines I log into daily so I may try that further.

https://termius.com/

Before I made the leap to Linux years ago, I loved using MRemoteNG. Simply hands down the best. IMHO

I tesed the client posted here by the OP. While it looks pretty nice, it suffers the same thing as others I’ve tried. Nothing beats the simplicity of the plain 'ol shell in Linux or in OSX. :)

1 or 2.
I don’t care so much for pixel art or the greenish ‘honeycomb’ one. The bottom left would be third choice.

Brings back memories of running “The Upper Room BBS” and “007 BBS” as a teenager in the late 80’s as a SYSOP. Those were fond memories, of having someone dial into your computer and making online friends from across the country sometimes.

I think now though, you can just Telnet into different BBS’s still.

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/list/brief/

I heard about it off and on, but this was the days in dial-up and downloading an ISO to install Linux was too expensive in time and bandwidth . I had discovered at my local Office Depot, a Mandrake Linux box set so I splurged on that and got my first taste of Linux then. I also was able to surf the web and learn how to install it manually, but it didn’t make any sense at all and was too complex. For Mandrake, I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t until later on when I started working with hosting sites, that I got used to Centos and Ubuntu for servers. I even had Mac OSX for a while, which taught my about the directory structure, but I went back to Windows until around 2015ish when I jumped ship and went to Linux fulltime. I worked technical support and the servers were Linux based so I had learned a lot more doing that and got very comfortable with it. I then jumped through different distros to where I am now (Arch). I firmly hold belief though that Arch isn’t the best and no distro is truly the superior one. Instead, whatever Linux distro you use, if it does what you need it to do, then so be it!

To answer the question though, what pushed me toward Linux was really the whole push toward Windows 10 being more loaded down with the pushed tracking and advertisements that comes with the Windows Territory. Plus - I grew to love the command line and it’s sort of my second home now.

This person gives a good run down of how to integrate NetData + Prometheus + Grafana to create a nice dashboard:

https://noted.lol/netdata-prometheus-and-grafana/

I am not much into those, but got into Netdata, it’s really just a nice information portal which provides way more data than one can use, but they pretty much expose it so you can use it for your purposes. I have it on a few of my systems and like looking at it when they seem slow.

For what I have for my end though - I use Proxmox for my VM’s and then use Portainer for a good rundown of what ports I have available to allocate. But then I also use docker compose files whenever I can so it’s easier to update/deploy as needed.

I use Arch with Wayland and it worked… Sort of…the idle animation was a bit busy as in it looked a lot like the frames between each animation weren’t erasing, but the mouse chase worked quite well.

For MakulukuLinux, to take full advantage of the AI , you have to pay to upgrade. I am an Arch user and tried it out for a bit, it was a bit limiting without unlocking the AI functions. Now, this was about 6 or so months ago, so it may have improved some.

My recommendation is to install qemu or VirtualBox or Gnome Boxes and test drive them there.