Ideal desktop for office work

[Member PPC]

My Dell 780 desktop that I recently started using, it’s the most wonderful machine. It has 8Gb of RAM (I think it started with 4Gb), my old 320Gb hard drive and antiX 22, 64 bits, full, with the latest Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice.
It’s, for me the ideal machine for office work:
– It boot to an usable desktop in about 35 seconds
– It suspends almost instantly and resumes from sleep almost instantly too, when I press the power button
– It runs all the web pages I require with ease (I can even watch youtube in 740p, in the official page)
– I loads LO Writer, for the first time in 7 seconds, then it takes some 3 seconds to load it
– I installed Ft10, configured it to my licking, enabled composition effects – my system looks like it’s running KDE or something similar (like Windows 11)
– Everything seems to work lightning fast, my professional e-mail, the pages I have to use, my printer- for me this is faster than the last windows 10 desktop I was forced to work with, over 1 year ago. I can not ask for a better machine to work with.

Now what amazed me : according to https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/Support/KB/Docs/DellModelYears, this model is from 2010!
Just wow.

PS: I did have one snag in this perfection – this hardware refuses to work with autologin- but hey, nothing is perfect, right?

Thanks for this amazing OS, and the amazing support you guys help provide here in the forum.

P.

• This topic was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by PPC.

[Member calciumsodium]

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PPC wrote:

PS: I did have one snag in this perfection – this hardware refuses to work with autologin-

I wonder if you would consider replacing slimski with slim if that would solve your autologin problem.

[Member andyprough]

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I agree, I’ve been using antiX for my office computers for a few years, works amazingly well and fast, even on old computers.

I don’t personally do autologin because I’m always working on some document or spreadsheet and I don’t want anyone walking in and thinking they can just sit down and use my computer to do some quick work or emails and then screw up and cause me to lose work. A short and easy to type password will normally make it nearly as easy as autologin, but still deter the other office workers from messing with your system.

[Member blur13]

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And if you ever lose your computer, you’ll be happy that at least its password protected.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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For a while I was using automatic login and I also set up sudo so that it would work for me without authentication.

But if you think about that combo anyone getting into that system could get to any of my stuff.

Though most of my stuff with PII has multiple factors of authentication, I finally went back to explicit login for both the login and sudo access. It’s not that difficult to enter authentication, even multiple authentication and with multiple layers and methods, while STILL not 100% foolproof, it’s two layers to make it slightly more secure. Bad guys will still go through wide open doors first, weak security second and other stuff afterwards. The big prizes are where the money is; however bad guys will use weakened systems as a springboard for various types of network attacks, such as the ones that attack this forum, so I don’t want to provide any super easy attack site from any of my systems.

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Brian Masinick

[Member techore]

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Identity theft is real. A co-worker of mine found out he owned and defaulted on a house in Idaho, US. Someone had stolen his identity.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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techore wrote:

Identity theft is real. A co-worker of mine found out he owned and defaulted on a house in Idaho, US. Someone had stolen his identity.

Yes, absolutely. A couple of my jobs near the end of my career were specifically about top notch security for financial services companies.

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Brian Masinick

[Member Xunzi_23]

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@PPC you probably know already, others do not so tiny tips for a desktop system.
Good to know your computer setup is enjoyable.

For LibreOffice setting
CrashDumpEnable=false
HideEula=1
Logo=0

in sofficerc is useful. Crash dump false as a memory dump can be revealing.
logo 0 slightly speeds up start as does --norestore start option.

Number Lock on can be set by adding

##number pad on after adding this
numlockx &

to desktop session startup file.

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Xunzi_23.

[Member Xunzi_23]

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@techore
trying to enter US when someone has stolen your identity has you in immediate detention
accused of id fraud. Same in UK.

In a proven not so old case the fraud was by an underground agitating agent of the police.
He had passport bank account house driving licence wife and kids, all in another persons name.

[Member andyprough]

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Xunzi_23 wrote:

–norestore

Just be sure to realize that you will lose your un-saved data if (or more likely “when”) libreoffice crashes.

I use the –norestore option on gigantic spreadsheets with a half-million rows of data, but that’s because the Libreoffice auto-save process eats up massive amounts of ram on huge spreadsheets and has stalled my computer in the past. However, when I use –norestore I save frequently. Otherwise I don’t use –norestore. Autosaving is usually more important to me than gaining a small amount of speed.

[Member Xunzi_23]

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Hi andyprough,
yes I do know unsaved work will be lost. I do save documents frequently having been crashdoze user.

Interestingly now we seem to have no more real autosave option in latest LO, what I have in front of
me now, which is irritating. Restore information is not really what I want, agencys love it as out of
direct user control..

Regarding Libreoffice crashing, I do not remember the last time, power down is more frequent, usualy
due someone hitting a powerline while doing building works with an excavator.

Looks like I have to see if I can find or write a genuine autosave and include backup file macro.

[Member andyprough]

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Xunzi_23 wrote:

Interestingly now we seem to have no more real autosave option in latest LO, what I have in front of
me now, which is irritating.

I’m on 7.4.4.2, and under Tools – Options – Load/Save, I have “Save AutoRecovery information every: ____ minutes” as an option.

Is that a good enough option?

[Member Xunzi_23]

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Thanks andyprough, autorecovery attempts to recover documents and certainly does, at times
fail. The way autorecover info is saved makes a manual recovery of even partial info near
impossible for users.

Autosave, for a long time a timed autosave macro setup from about 2015 worked.

My family tells me school students collectively went back to MS office due proper timed
autosave provision. Younger kids must use computers but take time to learn the magic and
safety of frequently tapping Strg s.

[Member techore]

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Xunzi_23 wrote:

@techore
trying to enter US when someone has stolen your identity has you in immediate detention
accused of id fraud. Same in UK.

Ugh. 🙁

[Member PPC]

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Bringing this thread more back on track: I just tried installing OnlyOffice on this desktop computer – disabling the right toolbar turns into into almost a clone of MS Office- nice for people that enjoy that (most Office users only know of MS Office, or Gsuite). OnlyOffice has an autorecovery feature, but I’m not sure how it works – in a simple test, of saving a file, force closing it and then reopening it, the file failed to show what I typed since last save… But I performed an extremely quick test only, I’m not sure how it will fare in real life (because it’s only a toggle, you can’t set the autosave period).

I can think of a simple script, that runs in the background and checks, for example, every 5 minutes, if Writer (or calc, etc) is the window in focus, and, if so, use xdo to fake the user pressing “CTRL + S”- but I’m unsure how this would affect users that are typing while xdo does it’s thing. I’m used to just pressing CTRL+S now and then, while working with Writer. In the very few crashes I had during the years I’ve been using LO, most of what I was working on was recovered, so I can’t really complain.

For people that have web connectivity, and are not working on anything confidential, they can use On-line Office Suites (like MS Office for free)- if the computer crashes, all the work is still safe on-line, but well, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, right?

Note: I’m testing a very recent version of https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/timestamp-backup

P.

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