An amazing OS for anyone brave enough to use Linux !!

[i_Love_Knowledge]

I really like Pop!_OS but I'm also more about learning computers, virtualization, and automation.

https://system76.com/pop

[MKing212]

If you want a fairly stable rolling distro, try Manjaro XFCE. Only downside for most people is that it updates about twice a month, and the updates are in the 400-700mb range. I find it much more stable than Ubuntu. Please note, handholding is discouraged, so if you don't want to learn to fix it yourself, this is NOT the distro for you. The community is one of the most friendly of the Arch distros.

Some computers will not run certain distros without a big hassle. My old HP would only run Debian based distros, while my current one will run just about anything.

[Lumos]

Thanks for adding your thoughts here folks !!

Regarding system76 - they made that distro because even Ubuntu has a bad time running on their lousy, overpriced h/w.

As proof, a good friend of mine bought their highest priced NB, and it never worked right, and he ended up with a $2000 paperweight, pretty much.

Their OS is aimed at redeeming their horrid h/w - and after trying to help him get his NB to work right I have no desire for anything from those crooks.

Manjaro is based on Arch Linux - and that is my turn off for it.

I've never seen any good reason to get into any variation of Arch - but then again, I've had ONLY stability from the LTS releases of Ubuntu since 11.04 as well.
(How long ago did you find some instability MKing212 ??)

I have seen this a bit with Mint and its variants:

Quote:Some computers will not run certain distros without a big hassle. My old HP would only run Debian based distros, while my current one will run just about anything.

Refusing to even live boot on certain h/w.

By way of contrast, HP h/w seems to be quite a Linux-friendly company, which is really good for when you need a decent NB at a cost of ~$400.

[DacInBC]

I have been using Linux on the desktop since about 2004 or so. I started with Mepis, it was a nice distro that did what I needed at the time. It was a one man show though and soon died.
I went to Debian for a while, which had nice stability and then finally Kubuntu (The KDE version of ubuntu). I have been running the LTS releases all along, but usually I am pretty loathe to upgrade to a new one as something gets lost, disappears or just doesn't work anymore. Case in point, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I went from 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS. I have to do my laptop yet. FYI, I am running a Lenovo G710 laptop (a bit dated now, but still reliable).
I work daily in Linux and can pretty much do anything and everything to do with my work very quickly and efficiently using linux. But, you have to almost have a bleeding edge version for many of the commercial tools to work. Or the people who build commercial tools don't keep them backwards compatible or updating. I find Linux frustrating some days.

I just dropped VMWare permanently in favour of VirtualBox. VirtualBox is still a commercial offering, but it is free and appears to just work. VMWare which I have used for about 10 years was always needing the drivers recompiled every time the kernel updated. Until it finally totally quit on me.

So pretty much everything I do, including IM, etc, is all done on Linux. I must say though, I miss flash because a lot of tools where written in it and have not really been migrated to anything else. Market Samurai is one of those items. I am stuck putting stuff like that into a Windows VM or dual boot my laptop.

Sadly, even with all its quirks, I have not seen anything that would take me away from the Kubuntu. I have looked at Mint, and a few others, but it seems when you go to download something it either has a binary for Red Hat or Ubuntu. I don't have time to go compiling every time I want a new version of software, I really love APT as a package manager. That is the really cool thing about linux, if you don't have a tool, it is a mere matter of minutes to get the tool you need.

My Desktop is an intel i5 with 16 gigs of RAM so I can do lots of virtualization which is part of my daily work.
As previously mentioned, my laptop is an Lenovo G710 from about 2015, with 2 gigs of RAM. Both work well.

[Lumos]

for your thoughtful reply here DacInBC !!
(Truly a reply worthy of Rep.)

I've been trying to show folks for quite a while that you can do anything in Linux AND have a better PC using experience thereby - even if it means using a VM with that other OS...
But most folks have been so falsely indoctrinated to think that win-doze IS the PC that they are unable to hear anything else, sadly.

I do not need bleeding edge (anything), so it is good for me to stick with the LTS releases as is, and VMWare does multiple partition VMs better than VB does, for my uses.

As for the DE - KDE does not suit me; it is OK and not painful like Unity was, but I prefer more of a classic desktop style.

What always makes me giggle is to hear folks that are standing there with an Android powered device in their hand saying how win-doze is king of everything.
Too silly !!!

[DacInBC]

Hey Smithnowt, I liked Vmware, but I do not like the price. Until I think version 11 or 12, it was easily pirated, but now it does a call home. I'm not big on disconnecting the internet to get something to work. Normally I would deal with it with a firewall, but my current router, I have just not had the time to put a firewall in the DMZ. I actually work on a firewall product daily.

I am not sure about your comment about KDE, my desktop is pretty much reminiscent of Windows XP. I am using the Oxygen theme. It has been like that since day one. I do not like the Windows 10 look and it seems that a lot of themes want to emulate that. I also to not care for the Mac way of doing things with the dock on the bottom (or top) which is pretty much what Gnome emulates. But to each their own, we have to live in our Desktop's daily.

But fun things I have to put up with in Linux are the changes. Currently I cannot connect to the OpenVPN at work, because their certificates are created with an older version of openSSL. Going between 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS, I lost some apps that I used and have yet to find a replacement. Luckily they are not daily use ones. After posting yesterday, I decided to upgrade my laptop from 16.04 to 18.04 and of course it went wrong. First thing I forgot to do was disable the screen blanker during the upgrade, so of course the screen blanks and there is a bug where you cannot log back in. You have to do an CTRL-ALT-F# to bring up another session and them use systemctl to unlock the screen. Well sadly, the other sessions where all black, so I have to log in blind, and then sudo the systemctl command. Then after all that I reboot the machine when it is done updating and then it just stops at the logo screen and goes no further. Of course nothing in the other sessions. This was a fun one, after reading just about every possible cause, I was finally able to add a command to the boot line and boot to the command line. Then I could do a startkde and my desktop came up. Progress, we knew that the update had for the most part gone as it should. After some more searching on the web, I finally found that I had to run dpkg-reconfigure sddm to reinstall the login part of things. After that we had a functioning machine again, but we probably lost the better part of two hours going through all the different things. Yes Linux can be frustrating and it is stupid things like that, that cause people to leave it. I mean windows has its fair share of hiccups, but it usually upgrades fairly easily.

Sorry, this wasn't meant to be a rant, lol, I use Linux daily and do enjoy it. When I boot my laptop to Windows, I get so frustrated because I cannot do my job properly, so many missing tools.

[Lumos]

Thanks again for another thoughtful reply DacInBC !!
Please share more if you may be inclined to.

I'm wondering if you referred to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_Project

The classic desktop I refer to is when I make the Mate DE into a shape most like what win2kpro used to be - that was my most preferred win-doze ever, and its all business, very plain UI was perfect for me.

My struggle of the day has been with some Samba problems that I hope to have worked out in the near future - but still, the only way I want to mess with win-doze is inside a VM now - and speaking of which:

I used a KG to get VMWare Pro, don't have it firewalled, and it hasn't acted up yet ??

Thanks Again !!

[ArnieAbrams]

Thanks to smithnowt and DacInBC for practical, personal info on Linux related info.

Keep us updated with your search for the optimal OS and DT!

Repped ya both.

[DacInBC]

(06-16-2019 06:49 PM)smithnowt Wrote:  Thanks again for another thoughtful reply DacInBC !!
Please share more if you may be inclined to.

I'm wondering if you referred to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_Project

The classic desktop I refer to is when I make the Mate DE into a shape most like what win2kpro used to be - that was my most preferred win-doze ever, and its all business, very plain UI was perfect for me.

My struggle of the day has been with some Samba problems that I hope to have worked out in the near future - but still, the only way I want to mess with win-doze is inside a VM now - and speaking of which:

I used a KG to get VMWare Pro, don't have it firewalled, and it hasn't acted up yet ??

Thanks Again !!

Yes I am running as of 16.04 (and now on 18.04) Plasma (KDE 5) with most of the theme being the Oxygen one. So as mentioned my desktop experience is most closely associated with Windows XP.
I am using Mate(not by choice) on a machine I connect to at work. For some crazy reason, Plasma will not work over XRDP as of 16.04 and it is still not fixed three years later! The solution is to have XRDP use Mate. Again one of those insane work arounds that you have to use on Linux.

Lol, Samba, I tried to share a directory the other day because I wanted to move a virtual environment that was over 16 gigs and I only had a stick with 15 gigs of formatted space available. It took me a while, but I finally shared a directory, but what a hassle. They really need to work on this and I see the comments and requests from people asking for Samba integration into the OS. I did try scp via Dolphin (the file manager I am using) but it kept erroring out. I could of used the command line I suppose, but whats the point of a gui?

What version of VMware did you manage to get working. I have Keygen for the second latest, but have not bothered since the switch. To be honest, I am pretty happy with Virtualbox. It does all the testing I need. I have our firewall running in it, windows 10 and Also OSx Mojave running too.

Windows 2000 desktop, that was the last version of windows I ran on physical hardware. In fact I still have it packaged up somewhere, I turned it off five years ago when I moved and never turned it back on.
Well, actually not 100% true, I still dual boot to Windows 10 on my laptop, but that is purely for testing our filter and firewall, so other than testing, I do nothing else with the box.

FYI, I have found that WINE is getting so much better. I can run quite a few programs with it. useful programs like S3Ripper :) but also Scrivener, and WinSCP. Version 4 can do so much more these days. But it can also make a d*** mess. Finding where it has installed things or put them in your menu is a royal pain. And it seems everytime I do a major OS upgrade, Wine breaks and I lose half the apps. Again, the joys of Linux.

However, the one place where I think we excel over windows is back up recovery.
Myself, I back up my entire Home directory to a standalone server here and then run rsnapshots 7 daily, 4 weekly and 1 monthly. I also do a dpkg -l daily into a file so I always have an up to date list of what is installed on my box.

If I mess up a piece of code or need an older file, I have it readily available to me and I have used this once or twice.

If I lose a hard drive or motherboard, it takes me less than two hours for a full metal restore and I am working again. Anything I missed I can apt-get as I need.
Try getting a windows box up and running in two hours on a new piece of equipment and restore all your apps.
Although I do know with things like Dato and other high end back ups, Windows is getting better.

Other places where Linux excels is they have always had a free IPSec VPN. Windows is just now catching up in that area, as they always pushed their own agenda or you had to purchase third party products.

Well I think thats enough about Linux for today, chat later...
D.

[Lumos]

Hi DacInBC.
You have made this into a really great thread IMO, thanks !!

I had pointed to that link because when I searched for the oxygen theme for KDE it brought several different things - but that looked like the most likely, is it the correct one ??

For remote access I use VNC and OPENVPN, which aren't the easiest to set up, but generally work great - I also use the free version of Anydesk which is simpler AND better in some ways, despite having limitations - for instance, screen scaling and speed are much better.

The way samba is being handled is just plain stupid !!!
I wasted more than a day just because of version differences that cannot be seen easily and only cured the problem via pointers given when I finally posted in several places asking for help.
In any location with a windows file server that has staff PCs needing file access - and the other PCs are being transitioned to Linux - samba NEEDS to just work - but it doesn't do so without a fight !!!

In answer for your query:
VMware Workstation Pro v15.0.3 Build 12422535

The vbox method of mapping shared network resources is just too screwy for what I needed.

When it comes to moving stuff around that is of any value, I prefer not to trust USB sticks 100% as I've had some of them brick on me randomly (and VERY inconveniently !!).
Instead I prefer using actual NB sized HDDs via a small USB adaptor.
The price differences are much less important to me than the reliability - and not too much anyhow when you consider that carrying 3 drives and 1 adaptor is loads of space and convenience.

I still have a win2k box here as well as VMs of it - that OS was just the best until things made demands for XP....grrrrr !!

WINE 4 is indeed odd.
It installed fine (I think ??), but does not show up - yet win-doze apps work anyhow ??
Very odd IMO.

Backup and recovery...
I seriously adore Systemback for that.
It is a bit fussy and takes careful setting up to get restores just right, but after I make a full system image with it, then a liveboot USB from that, it can be zapped into a brand new box in about 10 minutes and will then boot right into a fully configured (tweaked) OS needing very little attention to be 100% ready to use.
Macrium can also do this via boot media and storage media, but is much slower.
Also, I have learned to stay with EXT3 to avoid problems - EXT4 is failure prone for these operations.

OK, time to finish up for the night here - thank again for being here !!