drhoopoe

I wouldn’t mind there being a whole community devoted to pointing out shit that is poorly designed or just broken

But isn’t that every linux forum?

Yep, I’ve got a stack of 5-10 year old optiplexes (optiplexi?) running proxmox.

You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.

If that’s not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.

I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.

You have to enable it, but once you do it can do them automatically.

Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don’t really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).

However often you do it, you should definitely do it today to cover the serious backdoor that’s been discovered: https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-package-has-been-backdoored/

I’ve been using tmsu for years to manage thousands of pdfs and images for my academic research.

It can be set up to work with a webdav database. So yes, you could self-host the database and access it from clients with local zotero installs.