Long-term planning has been going on regarding the future of Dozerfleet hardware. As Microsoft is making dual-booting more difficult, and the future of Big Tech and respect for user privacy remains questionable, Dozerfleet has been researching heavily the merits of moving operations to a Linux setup.
The best dual-booting feature for the future appears to be to get a gamer-quality MacBook Pro, then set up the partitions to allow Linux Mint to be the secondary operating system.
With such a setup as that, the MacBook could then run macOS Monterey (or whichever OS replaces it in the future) to run Office 2019, Origin, The Sims 4, and the Affinity suite - Photo, Designer, and Publisher.
These would be for instances in which using high-end proprietary software is a must. At present, the only time that Photoshop Elements would still be used, is for making anaglyph images. Test results show that channel blending for this purpose in Photoshop still works thousands of times better than the most popular methods for Affinity Photo.
Premiere Elements is still top-notch for video editing; but a dual-boot Linux Mint Cinnamon session of OpenShot could work for video editing in a pinch.
For times when Office 2019 isn't imperative, and when LibreOffice apps would suffice, Linux Mint comes with those already installed. With a little tweaking, LibreOffice is at least on par with Office 2007.
For times when Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer, etc. aren't imperative, Krita makes for an adequate subsitute. As a bonus, Krita can do anaglyphs just as well as Photoshop - through a channel blending checkbox feature that Affinity Photo is woefully lacking. Darktable, likewise, makes for a nice replacement for Lightroom on any machine. Blender works natively in Linux.
All things considered, the only reason to keep Mac or Windows around at Dozerfleet, is for games and game modding (such as for The Sims 4), character modeling, and improvised CAD. All other operations are Linux-ready. So if the need to abandon Windows in the future becomes imperative, the full transition to Linux Mint would require minimal growing pains.
On bench tests, Linux Mint Cinnamon beats out Windows 11 in almost every important category. This is not to say it's a perfect OS. Getting WINE and Lutris to run particularly well is still at times difficult. Dozerfleet Mega Portable now runs Mint, as opposed to Windows 11. However, given the small size of its solid state drive, the file storage space gains have proven insignificant. The next Dozerfleet Main / Portable will need to be a slightly larger, and much more horsepower-heavy machine.
In the mean time, Dozerfleet Main can continue running a supported Windows 10 until about 2024 or 2025. From there, it can run an unsupported Windows 10 until about 2030. After that, it may be able to upgrade to a Linux distro, assuming the hardware doesn't die. This should be long enough to complete the remaining projects in Dozerfleet Comics' main comics division lineup. After that, Dozerfleet Literature will become the main focus - and Literature uses far fewer overall system resources.
