u/cpaz411

We are running a small hybrid tax compliance firm, and we use Azure virtual desktop (AVD) services both in the office and remote in order to secure access to all firm data. When it all works, it works great, but over the last two years we have had a number of issues with AVD dropping users and generally just not being stable when it really counted.

Some of these issues admittedly may also be more to do with our MSP who managed the AVD deployments.

That said, I am wondering if anyone can recommend an alternative to AVD that has been very stable during the business seasons? We are entirely cloud based in terms of our apps, data storage and portal, and primary apps we use are MS Office, CCH Axcess, QBO, and CaseWare. Thank you.

I am looking to upgrade from a Blackstone 28" that is both too small and starting to fall apart after 2 years, and while I had my eye on the Slate 36", I see I can get a 36" Model 1501006 for $629. Despite the smaller shelves, and I guess the lid is not quite as beefy, I am not seeing much of a difference between the prior model and the current one. Anything I am missing?

I like Fedora a lot and it's my preferred distro (along with the KDE DE) but I am not a fan of having to set up a bunch of extras at the end of a new install to get it working the way I want. I really like Ultramarine as for me, it is based on Fedora but works out of the box. It is stable, but also not ancient in terms of packages. In fact, I think any discussion that involves Mint or Zoran should also include Ultramarine, although for whatever reason, that doesn't ever seem to happen.

In any event, I think it would be worthwhile for Fedora to have a spin that is more like Ultramarine - that is, extras ready to go on install for those that don't want to spend a time looking for codecs and whatnot. Yes, I realize it is possible to add everything after and there are different guides explaining what to do, and I get some people enjoy doing that work as part of the hobby, so to speak. But many of us (as proven by the number of Mint and Zoran installs) don't want to spend a bunch of time running down codecs and extra packages to just get something working fast.

I really wanted to run Aurora on my laptop but have to dual boot with Windows as I need Windows for some work stuff. I tried to install it literally a dozen times only to have it fail right at the end. I finally went to their documentation, which I should have done earlier, and it clearly states dual boot on one drive is not supported. My ThinkPad can only have one SSD so I can't do anything about that. Before I give up and just move on, I wanted to see if anyone knew if there was a way around this (and a way that won't break in a week) despite it being officially not supported.