Anyone here using Linux?

I've been a Linux user since 1998, back when makemenu config was part of the install. Used most of the distros over the years but prefer apt based systems. Arch is pretty nice too, rpm packages in the late 90s left a scar that won't heal.

I remember when a Gentoo stage 1 install would take over 16 hours to compile only to realize I forgot to include filesystem support in the kernel. ReiserFS was my favorite until the dev killed his wife, ext3/4 from there on.

Anyone remember when you could buy redhat and Mandrake at Walmart?
 
Another Mint user here... Tried numerous distros over the years and settled on Mint now. Rock Solid and pretty much everything I need. I don't miss Windows at all.
 
I use Ubuntu installed on a $40 SSD for my daughter to play steam and web browser apps. It works incredibly however its in a Thinkpad W530 (i7, 32GB RAM, Nvidia video) laptop that is powerful.

My only dislike for the life of me cannot get my Brother All in One $99 laser printer to work with it. That printer works wonderfully with Windows, MAC, iOs etc.
 
Originally Posted by c5z06
I've been a Linux user since 1998, back when makemenu config was part of the install. Used most of the distros over the years but prefer apt based systems. Arch is pretty nice too, rpm packages in the late 90s left a scar that won't heal.

I remember when a Gentoo stage 1 install would take over 16 hours to compile only to realize I forgot to include filesystem support in the kernel. ReiserFS was my favorite until the dev killed his wife, ext3/4 from there on.

Anyone remember when you could buy redhat and Mandrake at Walmart?


Sounds like you and I have been playing with it on a relatively similar timeline. My first distro was Slackware, had it on CD's in like 1996? Used Gentoo Stg1 + Reiser for quite a few years, doing Redhat (then Fedora), Suse, Debian as well as some rather extensive toying with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD...etc on separate hardware. Always kept Gentoo on the main box because of how long it took to build it
lol.gif


My buddy ran Mandrake and later switched to Suse as his "distro de jour".

I remember downloading whole distros over dial-up and it taking days.
 
Originally Posted by c5z06
I've been a Linux user since 1998, back when makemenu config was part of the install.
Hmmm, I was using Redhat Linux (v5.0) in '95 and it was a graphical install even then. Only time I had to make menuconfig was when I wanted to compile my own kernel.

Originally Posted by c5z06
I remember when a Gentoo stage 1 install would take over 16 hours to compile....
I fell for that racket for a short time. There were a myriad of config switch options you could use to make your OS "faster" and they were almost always bovine excrement. You certainly couldn't feel or 'see' any speed improvement during use. Maybe if some random timed thing was done one would complete a few milliseconds faster than the other though !!

Originally Posted by c5z06
Anyone remember when you could buy redhat and Mandrake at Walmart?
Yeap, I do. I never bought them that way but do remember seeing them. That was back when it was declared that "Linux is ready for the desktop" ..... and I'm sorry, but that was easily 10-15 years too early.

I still have my Redhat install CD. It even came with 3-1/2" boot floppies for some systems that couldn't boot off of a CD-Rom drive.
 
CentOS on one PC (it's basically Redhat with the Redhat proprietary parts removed), and Ubuntu MATE on the other.

And I remember the days of having to manually recompile the kernel to get the best performance on a system with 4MB of RAM.
 
Ran PCLinuxOS for many years on my desktop. Picked up an old Acer netbook earlier this year that belonged to the wife's aunt. She was disposing of it and wanted her data destroyed, so she gave it to us. Seemed like a decent computer that was still useful, so I wiped out Windows and put PeppermintOS on it.
 
I've played around with Linux since the early 90's. Got serious with it around 2005. Made the switch in 2010 when W XP crashed and I lost my collection of digital and scanned 35mm negatives. When support for W XP died I converted all the computers to Linux. It's nice you can run old computers without having to upgrade to keep up with Windows.
I stopped disto-hopping when I landed on Mint Cinnamon. Rock solid. Recently switched to Mint LMDE for the media computer and the wife's desktop and laptop. Wanted to go back to a version of, mostly, pure Debian and concerned how long Conical will support Linux (they have done this before). Mint LMDE is light and very fast but my personal computers are running Debian Buster. Lighter and faster yet.
 
Since my last post I was "distro-hopping" a lot...

Now I switched on Linux Mint xfce on my Laptop.... Mint is really...just what you need/expect from a decent daily OS...

Found an interesting Mint fork....FerenOS...looks really promissing!

https://ferenos.weebly.com/get-feren-os.html



On mothers laptop I Will switch to android in a near future (she is running Mint Mate @the moment)....blissOS or android X86....will see...

Deepin was Nice....but lacked good support (Firefox was still 64....when in reality it major release was 72 @the Time etc). So I switched from it solo because of pure security...
 
Waiting for Ubuntu 20.04 (I've been tracking development since January in a virtual machine and the only thing updated today was the kernel on the desktop, and the kernel and git on the server) on 23 April, at which point I'll (remotely) update the dozen-or-so family, friends and neighbours I've over over the years.
 
Im still parked on 16.04. When I upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04, it broke a bunch of things on my home media server, so now I am holding out for as long as I can, hesitant to upgrade.
 
Originally Posted by Quattro Pete
Im still parked on 16.04. When I upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04, it broke a bunch of things on my home media server, so now I am holding out for as long as I can, hesitant to upgrade.

Ugh. It must be quite a job to get an entire OS which is by its nature duct taped together from disparate upstream sources, all with their own development teams. What went wrong with the media server? If user login credentials got borked that could have just been due to some overwritten configuration files or some changed encryption keys. Neither should have happened, of course; but sometimes major changes in applications necessitate changes in the way they communicate with other machines and accounts.

16.04 will be supported until April of 2021. Making a backup image of the / and /home partitions and testing an upgrade sounds like a great way to spend some quarantine time! (If you don't already, sometimes it's a good idea to leave / and /home on separate physical partitions, if not separate disks entirely - That way you can abstract the content/ media/ data you have from the OS, and back them up or upgrade them independently of one another.)
 
Originally Posted by uc50ic4more
What went wrong with the media server?

Long time ago, so I don't remember exactly. I think my external usb drive (where all my media is stored) stopped being visible after the upgrade. I had to re-map it to become visible again, and my two media servers (Plex and Logitech Media Server) were no longer seeing any of the content on that drive. I ended up having to reinstall these two programs to make them work again, but in the process of doing that lost all my configurations so had to reconfigure them from scratch. Not end of the world, but it was a PITA nonetheless.
 
I run Arch on my desktop, EndeavourOS on laptop. Wife runs MX Linux and son uses Manjaro. I've been MS free since 2003.
 
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Linux here as well.

I use Mint on my desktops and laptop, 17-19.3. Also using Raspbian (Debian based) on several Raspberry Pi's. This post is from a Pi 4. Very fast!
 
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There's a popular movement in the old Mac community(late PowerPC and early Intel) toward Linux. I've run a few distros on late PPC software, including Ubuntu and Lubuntu, but was never super happy with them as there was always a fair bit of stuff that just didn't work right.

For x86 hardware, I'm impressed by how well most of the common distros work out of the box. Often, the UIs aren't quite as "polished' as OS X/macOS or even Windows, but are perfectly functional and certainly a big step up from ~20 years ago when I first played with them.

We have several at work running Red Hat. They came configured for it and operate our NMR Spectrometers. Those stay pretty well locked down, but are stable and work well. At one time I maintained a CentOS VM on my computer to run vNMRj for offline processing, but haven't needed to do that in a while since openvNMRj is now available pre-built for macOS.

Even though I'm not really much of a Linux user, you have to admire the fact that it basically runs the internet and is a great choice both for heavy lifting computational use and for older lower resource systems that have been left behind by mainstream OSs and a bunch of stuff in between. You can make it anything you want, and can run a distro that encourages you to tinker as much as you want or just works out of the box. The best part of it all is that outside RHEL, they're all free.
 
I run Linux mint on my 2010 Lenovo g550. It was mid range back then so it's a pretty slow machine now. It definitely runs much better on Linux than windows 10. I also swapped an SSD from my newer 2013 Thinkpad after I upgraded it to a larger one.

It's been fairly stable, but I started having wifi issues with our new router. I'm not sure if the wifi chip is going out or it's a driver issue. I ended up parking it and just using the newer laptop for now.

I also upgraded my old desktop and installed dual boot windows 10 and Linux mint for my dad for his birthday since his old computer was getting really slow. I have to get his feedback still. It's his first time using Linux.
 
So many people in here give good advice. I know NOTHING about Linux but in the past received very sincere replies. I am writing this to the OP, some good people in here to help you.

I have learned to Hate Windows, been computing for decades with it and just moved to a Mac mini and LOVE IT, love it so much, I ditched my Android phone too.
With that said, I have a number of ok to very good laptops and desktops that I would love to run Linux on to try out. I just wish it was more plug and play, maybe I should just try downloading one to get a feel for it.

If there was one, just one, simple and easy to, lets say put on a laptop that has been slowed down by countless Win 10 updates, only used to web browsing, what would one choose?
 
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