Wine can be a bit of a headache if you are on a couple year older distro as it can make it harder to install newer Wine versions.

But I found that the Bottles project pretty much solves this, by installing everything in some kind of sandboxed environment:

https://usebottles.com/

https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles

Has worked wonderfully for the few cases where plain Wine failed.

> I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience

Which IDE do you use? JetBrains Rider?

Having a Windows 11 corporate laptop with a domain/Entra login, I actually trust it more than a home Windows 11 with a Microsoft account. Because if I lock myself out, I have a contact (corporate support) that is actually interested in helping me recover everything. With a Microsoft account it's a mess. I had so many problems with Microsoft accounts that I lost count of how many I have, and most are broken in some way, because of different issues and different service integrations over time. The Skype account is now useless. I never recovered my paid Minecraft account after one event. With a machine with a local account, now I have to be very careful on what I click related to MS accounts, because trying to solve various issues with Teams, I managed to get the local account linked with that MS account. I spent hours trying to recover a different account after I randomly filled one nagging question about birth date - who wants to give the real birth date to Microsoft - and then I got locked out because I said was underage :). So yes, one of the big issues is the push to have a linked OS account where you have to rely on MS support to solve your issues, otherwise you basically get locked out of your machine and other things you paid for.

Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).

I recently, by playing around with the LAN's default PAC file and a dummy HTTP server, discovered that on a machine that says in System Settings that Proxy Auto-Discovery is turned off, the PAC file is still fetched and used by a too-large number of Microsoft/Google background auto-update services, from Windows Update to Office.

* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114693762493884550

I had been lucky through having done my own experimentation, decades ago, with setting up a default PAC file on the LAN and having left it in just-send-everything-directly mode, keeping it as I upgraded things on the LAN, all of these years. Because otherwise I would have been vulnerable to a third-party in the search path for years, on a machine that clearly and unequivocally, including per direct inspection of the setting in the registry, has this switched off.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/web-browser-auto-proxy-configuration.ht...

> Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine.

Yes. With Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots taken every 5-7 seconds, completely disregarding if this may compromise your security, safety or privacy, we move from "you're the product" to "you're a pet in a zoo, and we want to learn from your behavior."

> I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.*

I mean, they could be recording every second.

I'm pretty sure that's a bandwidth issue.

Not because they really feel like giving you 3-4 second pockets of security, safety and privacy.

I don't trust microsoft to not push an update that exposes all my stuff. Their updates the last few years have been an absolutely shitshow in so many regards.

I know Altium doesn’t work, which is very important if you need to provide someone else files in Altium format. If you just want to work on designs there’s always Kicad, which is increasingly very good! But it can’t save in Altium format, and I’m not sure I’d trust it for manufacturing.

The other thing I’m missing is my 3D Gerber viewer called ZofZPCB. I’ve not gotten either it or Altium to even start.

The biggest migration challenge isn't finding one-to-one replacements for software, but rebuilding tested workflows and processes.

For years, I've had a seamless document management process on Windows for all my receipts and bills:

    1. My ScanSnap scans, auto-crops, and OCRs documents into a designated folder.
    2. A small open-source tool, DropIt [1], monitors that folder.
    3. Based on about 100 custom rules that parse the OCR'd text (for tax IDs, phone numbers, etc.), DropIt automatically renames and moves the PDFs into the correct subfolders.
    4. Nextcloud then syncs the organized files, and I can discard the paper originals.

When I explored replicating this on Linux, I found the building blocks exist. For instance, ocrmypdf seems to be a powerful OCR tool, and SANE drivers combined with gscan2pdf can handle the scanning. [2] I also found several tools for automated file renaming and organization.[3] However, the Fujitsu ScanSnap Home software provides an all-in-one experience for the initial capture.[4] More importantly, I'd have to manually translate all my pattern-matching rules from DropIt to a new system, likely a collection of shell scripts. I still feel that this is too fragile. I would need to program all exceptions myself: file renaming issues, special characters, length of document names, issues with OCR and alerting, should anything go wrong. The system needs to be fail-safe because once I throw the original away, there is no going back.

Then, another challenge is to find the time to replace this reliable system with the shortest "downtime" possible. I need this daily.. so I already decided I need a migration phase, where both systems run in parallel. Perhaps this better explains my slowness to migrate to Linux.

The fact that there isn't a well-known, integrated tool for this on Linux seems suspicious. It makes me wonder if I'm approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Is there a more "Linux-native" philosophy for this kind of workflow automation that I'm missing?

And yes, I'm aware of Paperless-ngx. It's a fantastic project, but I'm committed to my current folder structure and prefer to avoid a solution that centralizes my documents in a database, away from my Nextcloud setup and my filesystem-first-philosophy for document management. I don't trust that paperless-ngx will be available in 40+ years from now, but I need my document management to last that long.

[1]: http://www.dropitproject.com/

[2]: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

[3]: https://github.com/ptmrio/autorename-pdf

[4]: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/fujitsu-scansnap-home-software-f...