Let's talk Linux

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Linux. It's great to hear about your positive experiences with the operating system. As for other OS options like CentOS, I recently discovered some news about CentOS 7 reaching its end of life, which means that security patches and updates will no longer be provided by the community. However, there are options for extended support through services like TuxCare. I found this link to their extended support for CentOS 7: https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ in case anyone else is interested in learning more. It's always good to stay informed and explore different options when it comes to technology. As a new member of this forum, I'm looking forward to learning more from all of you about various tech topics!

 

Late to the party here but you don't need Linux to run Libre Office.

They have a Windows port as well and it's free and compatible with Office.

Libre Office

 

Another one late to the thread. I've been running Linux as my primary OS since 2006 or 2007. Had a pretty cool instructor in junior college networking/electronics courses who turned us onto Red Hat and Suse.

Since then I've tried a number of distros (first an OpenSuse guy mainly, then went the Debian/Ubuntu route). I used to enjoy the challenge of setting a new installation up, back when many drivers were not super 'plug and play'. Did a lot of compilation form source code on certain programs. Super fun and rewarding when you get it all to work.

Now I just use Mint. Clean, simple interface. Easy to get all the media codecs out of the box, minimal fuss to get up and running (like Ubuntu).

I do keep all my machines dual booting with Windows, partially for games, but mostly for music-production apps (DAW/VST plugins) that just don't run on Linux.

Back then, MS had a very anti-Linux and uncooperative attitude, but that seems to have changed a lot and more things are interoperable and open source/cross-platform these days. It's really nice to see.

 

A few thoughts based on reading this thread ...

MacOS is slowly shifting in being"closed", if not downright "locked". iOS has secured portions that can only be accessed with "jailbreak" ... but the best Apple support group (discussions.apple.com, create a user-account there based on your Apple-ID) will delete posts and even ban users who discuss "jailbreak". Also Apple Support Communities has moderators who limit sexual innuendo and abuse of others (not accusing you, but look in some of the other TW forums ...). But if you follow the rules there the volunteers who answer questions have combined decades of experience.

Back to "downright locked" ... MacOS is almost as locked as iOS. MacOS used to have an unlocked single system directory. Now there is a "locked, encrypted system-files" partition and an open user-files partition. Only Apple applications can modify the "locked, encrypted" partition. Even CarbonCopyCloner (for years an excellent rsync style backup tool) recently gave up trying to keep system clones (exact copies of the system to boot from external drives) because it cannot get around Apple partition protections of the "locked encrypted". It is secure as the devil now, though, from bad-actors.

Also MacOS interface is looking more and more like iOS. People who want to highly customize MacOS like Ubuntu be warned!

BUT ...

MacOS is still has excellent hardware support for the components that run in MacOS systems and gets security updates from Apple, as Windows does sometimes several times a day.



AS TO LINUX ...

Linux takes an independent spirit, and maintaining it takes more and constant oversight from users than "just push the power button" Windows.

And many companies only run Windows systems, and the corporate security is built around those Windows applications. Do not try to convince otherwise ... you lose. Just accept running Chrum and Edge and knowing the basics of operating Windows for 40 hours a week and do your thing the rest of the time.

 

Remember when Windows swore that 10 would be their “last” OS? That they were heading to a Mac type of system?

 

Yeah it is disheartening. :-\

 

I’ve dual-booted Win-Ubuntu since 2014 on my gaming rig. I went with Ubuntu cause that was OS that our SaaS provider ran our servers on at the time. I’m familiar with most major flavors though, since I support our AWS infra.

 

Holy crap, I just went through a 9 day nightmare getting my system back, installing 22.04 was insane! Never had this much trouble with a distro.

To be fair though . . . most of that nightmare was not the fault of Ubuntu. I had a GEForce 8400 card that has somehow managed to get through installs since 17.04. I also had an old HD in hardware that is probably on its last leg. I had to completely unplug it, then everything went a little more smoothly. Pulled those suckers out and switched to integrated graphics and it's humming along nicely. Now replaced by a cheapie XFX Radeon 8GB RX580 (I don't need stellar graphics performance.)

My only complaint (you knew there would be one) is that a lot of things that worked as recently as February no longer do, or only partially. I've never been a fan of the Gnome DT, I've always liked Unity (sue me.) That is no longer a "theme" or even shell option, Unity Desktop is a full OS install (typing from it now on my lappie.)

Fiddled with a few Unity-like themes, but - you guessed it - most of them require resources that aren't supported and can't even apt them. Set it aside for now but I'm looking at Arc. I've tweaked Gnome enough to make it usable.

Unity has a couple problems too - right click an image, or upload a file, the dialogs go UNDER the window from which it's called, giving the impression it's not opening. Once I figured out what's happening I can get through, but it's annoying.

 

Have you tried the Mint Cinnamon desktop? It's Ubuntu based and honestly it's the only distro I run anymore. It's as polished as anything Apple has. Download 21.2 and just boot it off a USB. You won't be disappointed. Although you will have to redo your system again. lol

 

Just installed the latest Linux Mint LTS version on in-laws 2012 MBP. Very easy install and simple for them to use. I liked what I saw. I would consider this for my personal desktop running LTS Ubuntu but I just can’t seem to leave Ubuntu despite all its warts. I think it’s a loyalty thing or something.

 

What drivers are you using for the Nvidia card? I was using the propriety drivers from my 9800GT to my GTS 450 then on to the GTX 550 Ti. Just pulled the old GPU out, pop the new GPU in and everything just worked.

I've always preferred rolling release distros. Just install updates as they come, usually no big surprises.

Eventually, I'll need to find a new WM. Some distros are trying to push the deprecation of X.org, and Fluxbox doesn't appear to be getting any major (if any) updates.

 

Well, thereby hangs a tale . . . the short answer is don't know, but they would be whatever was required.

Back around 2017 or so I installed this card on 17.04 before 17.04 under Windows 7, I installed Ubuntu and set up a dual boot. I recall I had to wrestle with it a bit, got it working, done. At the time I had an older 2 core MSI board.

When 20.04 came along, did an upgrade from command line. All good.

Last year, sick of having to close down hungry apps to open others, I pulled the mobo and installed an MSI B560M -VDH PRO, with 64 GB RAM. I put the same HD and Nvidia card in, didn't have to do any tweaks, it all just worked. I'm pretty sure it was at this point when the BIOS loaded it switched from UEFI to CSM, but it all worked because stuff was already installed.

About 10 days ago (been struggling with it that long, yep) I got an auto update, installed, rebooted . . . to no Internet.

Pretty sure it was at this point I misidentified the problem. The new kernel (5.4.0-169-generic)
that installed was not compatible with the onboard Realtek hardware. I rebooted, selected the older kernel (I think it was 4.15.... something) and it booted up with the Internet fine.

At this point I decided it was a good idea to upgrade to 22.04, again from within the system and that's where shit really hit the fan and I was 9 full days figuring it out. I was beginning to think I no longer needed a computer LOL . . . wouldn't reboot, grub menu gone, Boot Repair disks didn't work because the volume in question was LUKS encrypted and I couldn't get it to load or mount well enough to satisfy Boot Repair.

Using install USB's for both 20.04 and 22.04, the Internet worked fine, even with other kernels. Began reading up on UEFI and CSM. It was at that point I found that I'd set it in BIOS to UEFI and it would immediately revert to CSM. It wasn't until I was sitting there staring at the black screen wondering when the hell I was going to get my life back that I saw a message flash across the screen "THIS graphics card does not support UEFI, switching to CSM."

I read the installs should be done in UEFI, I ripped the card out, installed 22.04 on an empty partition . . . . and it's all back. I'm still struggling with issues on the old encrypted disk and my data, but all good, time to clean house and will probably steer away from encrypted drives from now on, they're fine until they're not.

There's more, I'll stop though LOL

 

Hope y'all are on RHEL 8 or 9. 7.9's EOL is coming up soon.

 

At this point I'm just running Gnome with the default Yaru theme but have installed some extensions to make it more "Unity like" to an extent. I really liked the old Unity GUI but now it's not just a theme, it's the entire OS.

Why not just use Unity? I nuked the lappie on which I'm typing and installed Unity 7.7 (Which is Ubuntu 23-something underneath.) I like it but it has some problems. Not sure if it's FF or Unity, but any time you open a new dialog, as in "save as" or upload an image, those dialogues go UNDER the current window, it just appears broken but if you minimize the current window, there it is. It's not a huge deal but still I suspect other things will reveal themselves, I'm going to wait it out.

What does Red Hat have to do with Ubuntu? Not being a smart ass, asking. I know I just moved to a different VPS service and CentOS reaches EOL next year, as well as PHP 7xx, so I set it up with AlmaLinux8 and PHP 8.3.

The main reason I switched to Linux was that everything normally just works. In Windblows I was always doing this crap to get things to work - in fact the Nvidia card in question was originally installed in Windows 7 before I began running Ubuntu. The last week+ has been hell for me, fiddling with this crap, I have stuff to do and just need it to all work. My nerdiness is more in the web stuff, OOP/PHP, JS, that's where I like to work. Not spending a week getting it working.

 

Modern distros usually just work. It hasn't always been that way. When I first got into Linux I settled on Arch. I spent at least 1 day repairing the system for every 7 days using it. At the time it was type 2 fun but that's only because I've been a techie my whole life. I just like to figure out how things work and am willing to suffer massive failures to achieve that. lol

 

Recently moved all my stuff to plain old Debian. Really impressed…it’s rock solid, features work, and it was easy to get my nvidia stuff working.

 

Also, i got tired or Arch and Manjaro. They work fine, but sooo many updates


Also Manjaros default disk encryption configuration does it all through grub, which makes the initial unlocking of the drive very slow, adding 20-30 seconds to the boot time. Debian does it after loading the kernel, so it’s lightning quick. I suppose there are tradeoffs, but as long as my data is behind lock and key i’m happy.

 

I'll tell ya what though. This is really starting to PI$$ ME OFF. Settings, Gnome tweaks, dconf editor, command lines like

Code:

sudo gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-format '12h'

nothing changes it. Going to try the Arc theme tomorrow, maybe it's just a theme thing.

(What I want is AM/PM)

 

That sentence right there is why I don't run Linux on my main computer. All of my servers are exclusively VMs running Debian, but they are also all command line so video drivers aren't really a thing. For a very long time I was a windows guy until I got a gig that was 60% Mac. I switched over and never looked back.

I started back in the day using Red Hat, but for reasons I can't remember switched to Debian when Woody was the current version. Since it's what my servers run I'm much more interested in rock solid up time vs fancy features.

 

I can’t get behind gnome. KDE is my daily, i3 when programming, XFCE if I want something in the middle