I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
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If Privacy and control is a concern then the best is probably to host your own notes on Nextcloud (or use the Notes Nextcloud app).
Turtl looks alright, but also pretty limited compared to the mainstays of note-taking.
I work with a lot of charts and images so, sad to say, I find OneNote as my best option currently and unfortunately means I have only the web interface for Linux.
Great article.
At work I got the "your on your own for support" but thankfully the system administrator at the time was a BSD & Mac guy so he did try to lean towards the things (VPN, etc.) that would work or possibly work with Linux.
Handy side benefit, though, is now I am managing the BSD & Linux web servers and sites I think largely because of my Linux experience at home. I am constantly finding that working with these servers would be easier if I were on a Linux machine as well.
We have moved our Windows development systems to separate VMs that we RDP into, so the requirement for my local machine being any specific OS is limited more by the "powers to be" and their use of AD to control things than technological.
At home the biggest (only?) reason to use Windows is for games. While there are only a couple and they seem to work in Linux under WINE, they also seem to not have the same performance (or quality of view) when running on Linux.
Understand these are all older machines that I've gotten 2nd (or 3rd) hand so they don't have a lot of extra "oomph" so this dip in user experience is noticeable. Maybe if I got something younger than the Core 2 Duo stage (any i3/i5/i7 would be newer) then my mileage may vary favorably.
My wife did her best to understand and use Linux. For the most part she was accepting of it. She is a professional artist, and computers are a necessary evil.
When she had a project, however, and we were not [a] finding a tool to do what we needed and [b] finding a tool that was understandable and intuitive enough for her to use.
I sat her down in front of my work laptop and opened a file we were working on. Previously it was her telling me what to change and me doing it at work and printing results.
She finish the project quickly, finding the tools pretty easily and enjoying the little things of the program. What happened next, though, was that she started exploring the program and getting into trying out different features. She was playing with the program.
That told me that pushing the open source versions on her would have been a disservice. She needed to use what she will be comfortable with.
One thing that has changed, over the past 10-20 years that I've been paying attention to it, that helps the migration is how just about everything is available online. So long as you have a browser, you can be productive. That helps me whenever I try a different distro ("have browser, will work") or OS.