Let's talk Linux

There are plenty of Linux forums out there filled with uber geniuses, kings of the computer flame world, but let's talk Linux for the average user. What you love, what you hate, what keeps you tied to Bill Gates' or Steve Jobs' broken toys.

When Windows 10 came along I fell for the free trial. Bereft with privacy issues, the last straw was when I launched the Calculator - the most simple and reliable app on Windows, that looked like a broken toy in Windows 10 - and saw the message "connecting . . . "

Say what? Connecting to what? For a calculator?

I went straight to Best Buy and bought a new HD, installed Ubuntu 17.0, and set up a dual boot with Windows on the old HD and Ubuntu on the new. As I discovered anything I could do in Windows I could do in Linux, I spent less and less time going back to windows and eventually stopped booting to Windows entirely.

My wife's concern is "what if I get a job in an office and need to use MS Office?" There's Libre Office which has almost the exact same sub-programs and can even open and export MS Office formats. For any argument for Windows apps there are at least a dozen Linux apps and almost all of them are free.

Photoshop? Gimp. Windows video editing? I use OpenShot. All the browsers have Linux distros. Pick your poison, all open source and free.

It's also customizable. Most people like the Gnome desktop, I really like Unity and hope they never kill it. Even then you can switch desktops as often as you like. We're not talking background displays, the entire desktop.

And support? With an Ubuntu One account (free of course) you can access the Ubuntu Forums, actual helpful people out there that know what's up as opposed to the MS support forums.

I described it to one of my bosses like this: Instead of paying annual or monthly subscriptions to hang on to a broken vulnerable OS built by overpaid coders in Seattle, Linux has thousands of contributors around the world finding and fixing bugs and it's all free. Linux is one of the last bastions of free computing.

If you're still "skeered" of messing up your system, you can even try it without installation. Download the latest .iso, burn it to a CD, tell your computer to boot to the CD first, and restart. You will come to an option to try it out without installing, or install. Linux used to be a geeks-only platform, but there have been so many improvements over the decades it's very nearly as intuitive as anything Apple or Windows has ever come up with.

Take it away, talk Linux.

 

Agree with all of the above. It's not my professional forte, but after taking a Linux class in college I loved it. Simple, fast, tons of support and free (not just monetarily). The only reason I'll keep a partition for Windows on a personal computer is to run NX or Solidworks.

 

Beef up your machine and you can run a VM or Wine to do that. In my cross browser tests, I run multiple Windows OS's as well as a couple Mac OS's just to test.

 

I've used Linux for 20 years now. Started on Arch when it first came out. Install was a bitch and you'd better damn well be command line savvy. Linux has come a long way since then. Currently running Mint 20.3 Cinnamon. I still use command line a bit but not because I need to with modern distros. I do it because it reminds me of the good old days when you had to want to run Linux. lol

 

Haha as you know that's all still there too, and you can get a lot more out of your system doing some dirty work. Speaking of nostalgia, remember all the Windows gaming apps that just up and died when Windows when to 32 bit? Many of them have a 32 bit port for Linux and you can run them! All those DN3D maps can be re-visited with eduke32.

 

Linux has had a lot of breakthroughs over the years. One of the absolute largest was when Steam opened for Linux. That was 2013-ish. It's adoption has grown exponentially since then. Hell, Nvidia even released proprietary drivers for Linux about that same time. Last year they stepped it up and made their kernel drivers open-sourced.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/

 

Love my Ubuntu Server headless NAS. It required some learning and I keep a cheat sheet of commands for when maintenance time rolls around. It serves our needs right now but I'm looking to the future.

The current tower is 32 bit (x86?), so we can't upgrade to 20.04. That, and I'm considering adding whole-home media server to its list of jobs.

 

I dabbled with it a bit, but I could never get it to work right with my sound and graphics card. Ultimately jumped ship to Mac OS and never looked back. That's kind of linux based right?

 

Apples OS is Unix based.

 

Haha that's one of the arguments that always comes up, the underlying system of modern Macs is Linux but the GUI is proprietary Apple.

I thought it was Linux. 'X'ed anyway LOL

 

I got Ubuntu back in 2010(?) for an online class, boy, I mean... Grrr!! It kept crashing & lotsa patience to reboot. I even took it in for repair but the nerds found nothing wrong with it.
Once it was up & running, it was good, then the system would freefall. I gave it away & got a Dell laptop.

 

When I finally got my head on straight in tech support I quit the OS wars. I've made a good living thanks to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, et al. Long may their buggy ass software reign. My team will bitch and moan sometimes, but I try to get them to understand we don't get paid because IT is easy. If God forbid the knuckleheads above started making software the "just works" why would they need us?

 

Built my own computers in the past including my current tower desktop (2012). Started messing with Linux Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog on an old Win98 laptop. I was very intrigued. I would always check out a new release every so often and try it out but always remained with Windows.

I think it was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx in 2010 when I went full time, daily driver with Linux. I have been running dual boot Linux/Windows for years. So I do keep Windows 10 for those odd occasions I need something specific done but 99% of the time I'm in Linux. I run a Plex media server off this desktop and it's been awesome. Everything works. Printer, Graphics Card and Sound Card. Don't like drag and drop not working on open folders on the desktop.

Back when kids came along in 2006 my computer tinkering time started to diminish. So I ensured that I have the essentials with Linux. With 2 kids to deal with over the years it left little time for tinkering. I will upgrade to a new LTS release every 3-4 years and spend the time to reformat and re-install. This desktop is getting old but still runs awesome. I may build a new one in the next few years and teach my Son. Kind of gave up on Computer gaming and gaming in general. My new Tacoma has my attention these days.

Yes, Mac OS Wallpaper.

 

Speaking of servers, if you're on Windows people usually set up WAMP to do local web development/testing. Apache/MYSQL is native to Linux, you just have to set up your hosts file to work locally.

 

macOS is based on BSD which is based on unix. Linux is its own thing that a long and stupid law suit proved contained no unix code. That said the differences between macOS, linux, and every flavor of unix I've used is esoteric. The best analogy I have is like driving a manual transmission. If you can drive one brand, you can drive them all.

As for using linux as a daily driver, well ain't nobody got time for that. I need my computer to work, and me working on my computer to make it work is not an effective use of my time. My personal favorite is macOS, but Windows is fine too. Servers all get Debian, desktops not so much.

 

I like Linux Mint & Android. Very easy to use & dependable.

Linus is a good guy.

 

Alright. I'm a prospective customer here. I'm angry as hell that office went to a subscription model. Froth at the mouth, will rant about it and ruin everyone's dinner - angry.

I need a good backup storage archive. One that will auto upload my phone pictures and sync documents. What are you Linux nerds using for a One Drive alternative?

 

Dropbox works great on linux.

 

I've been Linux on the desktop for close to 20 years now. Forced to use windows at work, but sure enough, I can run linux in a VM there, so I have all my favorite tools. The product I work with runs Linux, so linux is paying my bills too. I'd consider a Mac, but their hardware is real hit or miss.

MX Linux is my current go-to on the desktop. Been through Arch, Manjaro, Slackware, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE, Gentoo, Void and probably a few others over the years. Dabbled with FreeBSD as well.

 

Eh, I still use Windows on my personal and work machines and it works well enough and with minimal fuss. Mac users at work have a lot more issues and just aren't as well supported.

Dating myself, I first downloaded Slackware Linux onto floppies using Compuserve while running OS/2 Warp. I liked OS/2, way more advanced than Windows 3.1 at the time. I've toyed with it several times over the years, running minimal Mint installs on cheap netbooks, etc. But, I was a PC gamer for a long time, and Windows was just the best option.

I have an Unraid server I use for running a raid array for backups and a pi-hole container. If I had a huge digital media library I'd run a media server as well, but pretty much everything I want to stream is available from other places that are just as easy or easier to use.