You may already have a local dns caching mechanism on your computer. I think by default Ubuntu uses systemd-resolved (it does on my desktops anyway). If you check dig it’ll show lookups coming from 127.0.0.53. With that in place, your local machine is caching lookup results and anything it doesn’t know, it’s forwarding to the network’s resolver (which it gets via dhcp, usually).
I set up an old thin client with Debian and lxqt to connect to a VM on Proxmox. Got the idea from an Apalrd’s Adventures video about VDI. It worked pretty well on a decent network, but it really suffered on high latency networks.
Take this with a grain of salt, the more I re-read, the more I realize I’m making assumptions about your setup that may or may not be true. First, I’m making an assumption that you’re doing ACLs for samba shares (and I know that system better on FreeBSD than Linux). I’m also assuming based on your description you want everyone to have access, but not write access.
I think you could do an officewide group with read-only permissions on all of the shares and then set the unix group to the department.
So, for your HR team you’d do chgrp -R hr /path/to/parent/shares/hr and setfacl -m d:g:rwx /path/to/parent/shares/hr and add the officewide group’s read-only perms: setfacl -m d:g:officewide:rx /path/to/parent/shares/hr. Rinse and repeat for each share.
Not sure if this is what you’re after, but maybe it’ll help lead in a good direction.
For me it’s the Mac Finder. It’s always running so (unless it crashes) there’s no delay in opening a file manager window and, more importantly, it has built in Quicklook and Miller columns. Haven’t managed to find a good-enough implementation of either of those in Linux, so I just work around it.
Kate is really a hidden gem. It’s so light weight and just gets out of the way. I’m now installing it everywhere—Linux, Mac, or Windows.
My experience has been mostly positive. I hit a situation a couple times where a particular app hanging will prevent other flatpaks from launching. That took a while to figure out, but otherwise it’s pretty good. In general things work the way they’re supposed to.
My only experience with homebrew is on macOS and I’ve switched to MacPorts there. Homebrew did some weird permissions things I didn’t care for (chowned all of /usr/local to $USER, if I’m remembering right). It worked fine on a single user system, but seemed like a bad philosophy to me. This was years ago and I don’t know how it behaves on Linux.
I also prefer Firefox, but when I need a Chromium alternative for testing, I opt for the flatpak (or the snap) version personally.
On the crazy low-scale end, I have a no-name dash cam that I found for $5 on a tchotchkes table at my local Chinese takeout place. It works perfectly with my Linux desktop—both reading from the SD card and streaming directly via USB. Not at all what you’re looking for, but it makes me think that if this random junk works, more mainstream devices probably do too.
I think it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I had the same issue at first and the more I used the command line, the more I started to prefer it to GUI apps for certain tasks.
A couple things that I use all the time:
cd - goes back to the last directory you were in (useful for bouncing back and forth between locations)!$ means the last argument. So if you ls ~/Downloads and then decide you want to go there, you can cd !$.:h removes the last piece of a path. So I can do vim /etc/network/interfaces and then cd !$:h will take me to /etc/network.
Unbound can query the root dns servers, but it’s also commonly used as a recursive resolver, which just uses a server upstream, similar to
systemd-resolved. I use unbound network-wide, but I have it querying 9.9.9.9 to take advantage of their filtering.