Linux General Questions

I like all three OSes. Windows works well and is if course king for gaming. There are killer apps for OS X and the fit-and-finish is attractive. But I like the holistic combination of the Linux kernel + shell + X + window manager more than either. I don't like trying to shoehorn bash into Windows. I don't like some of the UI decisions in OS X (e.g., default keymaps and different keys), and don't want to resort to a non-native brew system.

With Slackware, I control everything mod relying on Slackbuilds and sbopkg. These tools don't take care of dependencies which means more work but not much. And it's all discrete and clear. I'm always using the speed of native tools (except for some lamentably useful binary blobs like Flash and, I guess, AMD's driver). I also tend to shy away from the *buntus abd other distros with dependency-managing packaging systems and repos because I'm not sure what's going where. Do Mint's Software Package Manager and apt-get and aptitude all push things into the same places? I don't know, abd so can't comfortably switch between them. I cab research that more, of course, but don't feel like falling down that rabbit hole.

That said, I'm still tempted to try a Mac, probably the 13" Air. I can't justify the expense , though, when I've got access to a pretty nifty i7 box no one's using.

Everyday I watch someone use Windows or OS X, I'm reminded of how much I enjoy my Linux setup. Having gone from "Man, I like Windows Vista" (yes, I've said that before), to using OS X for a couple years, and then running back screaming to Windows after that, I feel like I can just cuddle up into the arms of GNU/Linux.

trueheart78 wrote:

Everyday I watch someone use Windows or OS X, I'm reminded of how much I enjoy my Linux setup. Having gone from "Man, I like Windows Vista" (yes, I've said that before), to using OS X for a couple years, and then running back screaming to Windows after that, I feel like I can just cuddle up into the arms of GNU/Linux.

Once it clicks, it's hard to give up the control, customization, and general how it works.

I used to think that way, but then the GNOME team lost its collective mind, and Linux has been painful for me ever since.

The current Xubuntu seems pretty good, though. I haven't spent a lot of time with it yet, but it seems to be approaching a reasonable comfort level.

To each their own, but I much prefer Arch+GNOME to OS X or Windows Anything.

At this point I prefer Macs almost entirely for aesthetics. I like both the hardware design and the OS, but there's not really a 'killer app' that's keeping me here. Actually, I much prefer the application vs. application window paradigm that OS X uses, even if not all application developers follow it as closely as they should. It's been long enough since I used linux on the desktop, though, that it might be possible to do the same thing there.

Due to my job, my choices basically came down to OS X or linux. Windows was a no-go due to how much time I spend ssh'd into linux boxes. I know there are apps I could use to ssh into various boxes, and cygwin would get me a lot of the command-line apps that I use regularly, but I'd rather just have that stuff natively. And on the off chance that OS X doesn't have a native version of something, or I want to install some other tool (ag, for example, seems faster than grep or awk and I find the output more useful), homebrew works great.

If I was still doing .Net or C++ dev, I'd be using Windows for Visual Studio. Actually, computers are powerful enough that I'd probably just pop it up in a VM.

Ars has a good review of Linux Mint 17:

Mint 17 is the perfect place for Linux-ers to wait out Ubuntu uncertainty

They point out, and I agree with the observation, that Mint is totally focused on the desktop, while Ubuntu is off faffing about with tablets and smartphones, and screwing up their desktop experience something fierce.

They're very pleased with Cinnamon, and while I had a crashtastic time with earlier attempts to use Mint/Cinnamon, it seems to be running quite nicely in VMWare now. (just be sure to turn on 3D acceleration in the settings.) I've only been running it for an hour or so, but I've been pretty comfortable with it, so far.

MATE is good too; it's just a nice quiet desktop that stays the heck out of the way and lets you get your work done. It has none of that GNOME3 crap with having to cross your desktop with the mouse several times to do simple stuff. MATE has been my main environment in Linux for awhile now, but it looks like Cinnamon may finally be working well enough to take over.

From the article, Mint is changing their approach. Now that Ubuntu has an LTS out, they're not going to keep tracking Canonical's releases. Instead, they're going to stay on this base, and work on their own changes to the system for at least the next couple of years.

That's probably pretty smart; the next couple of Ubuntu releases are likely to be very painful, with their insistence on using their homegrown Mir compositor, instead of contributing to the community's choice of Wayland.

I am by far not a connoisseur of distros, but when I'm not installing Slackware (which became just a little to involved for me on a machine without an optical drive, at work (though I was able to do so at home so...?)) I'm installing Mint. I have a vm on this work machine and I have a faster machine with Mint as the host and Win7 as the guest. I hope to transition to the latter soon.

I am a little confused, though, due primarily to not having researched it: there are at least two ways to install applications in Mint, and I assume Ubuntu in general. I can use the Software Manager thing or I can use apt-get from the command line. Is Synaptic also around? I haven't checked. Do they point to the same log of applications, such that I can use them interchangeably, or should I stick with one or the other?

I always use aptitude, which is a command-line utility like apt-get, but smarter, but I'm pretty sure that synaptic and the Software Manager are both different interfaces to the same underlying engine. You can use whichever you like, and you can swap around freely, AFAIK.

The reason I use aptitude is because it marks auto-installed things as auto-installed, unlike apt-get, so if I remove a package later, it will remove any unneeded dependencies. I assume Synaptic and Software Manager do that too, but I just don't use those.

I'm using Mint 17 on my work desktop and have been using Mint since 14 at work. It's pretty good but Chrome almost always locks up the damn machine.

Chrome is becoming problematic in my experience. Especially in a Mint vm.

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on both my work and home laptops, and I like it. With the move to Mir coming soon, I'll be on this until at least 16.04 LTS - perhaps longer, depending on what they mess up.

trueheart78 wrote:

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on both my work and home laptops, and I like it. With the move to Mir coming soon, I'll be on this until at least 16.04 LTS - perhaps longer, depending on what they mess up.

Yeah, I think it's quite likely that the next several revs of Ubuntu are likely to be unpleasant to use.

I've been running Xubuntu 14.04 some, too, and it's also pretty good. I just hate GNOME 3, and I don't like modern KDE much. It was pretty good, fifteen years ago, but it just feels so crude and unpolished in 2014 that I don't enjoy using it.

So, Xubuntu's good, Mint/MATE's good, and Mint/Cinnamon seems good, though I haven't been using it for long.

Debian's real nice in GNOME3 fallback mode, but it's the usual crap experience if you have accelerated video hardware.

Malor wrote:
trueheart78 wrote:

I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on both my work and home laptops, and I like it. With the move to Mir coming soon, I'll be on this until at least 16.04 LTS - perhaps longer, depending on what they mess up.

Yeah, I think it's quite likely that the next several revs of Ubuntu are likely to be unpleasant to use.

I've been running Xubuntu 14.04 some, too, and it's also pretty good. I just hate GNOME 3, and I don't like modern KDE much. It was pretty good, fifteen years ago, but it just feels so crude and unpolished in 2014 that I don't enjoy using it.

So, Xubuntu's good, Mint/MATE's good, and Mint/Cinnamon seems good, though I haven't been using it for long.

Debian's real nice in GNOME3 fallback mode, but it's the usual crap experience if you have accelerated video hardware.

Personally, I just can't go back to the WinXP style taskbar unless it's like Win7's icon-taskbar mode (which was awesome for me), and I suspect is kinda why I like Unity.

I really like the Win7 taskbar. I was mad about losing QuickLaunch, but when I realized that taskbar pinning was way better, I was a total convert.

That's the best feature in Win7, in my view.

Does mint come with Gparted on the Live CD? The Ubuntu Live CD has started to crawl on our older computers at work.

Debian + dwm.

in Ubuntu 14.04, is there a way to unlock the left bar to launch program ? I wanna put it on the lower part of the window, or top.

I know in 13.04 it couldn't be done tho.

Manach wrote:

in Ubuntu 14.04, is there a way to unlock the left bar to launch program ? I wanna put it on the lower part of the window, or top.

I know in 13.04 it couldn't be done tho.

Mark Shuttleworth says it shall be on the lefthand side. Thy will be done

Citizen86 wrote:
Manach wrote:

in Ubuntu 14.04, is there a way to unlock the left bar to launch program ? I wanna put it on the lower part of the window, or top.

I know in 13.04 it couldn't be done tho.

Mark Shuttleworth says it shall be on the lefthand side. Thy will be done

I would opt for the top if M.S. allowed it.

trueheart78 wrote:
Citizen86 wrote:
Manach wrote:

in Ubuntu 14.04, is there a way to unlock the left bar to launch program ? I wanna put it on the lower part of the window, or top.

I know in 13.04 it couldn't be done tho.

Mark Shuttleworth says it shall be on the lefthand side. Thy will be done

I would opt for the top if M.S. allowed it.

I read that MS and thought "But you can put the task bar at the top." and then instantly thought WTF, Windows is more flexible than Linux?

More flexible than Ubuntu, anyway.

But the link earlier, for Mint 17, being based off Ubuntu 14.04, showed the launch bar on the bottom..

How can a newbie install Mint, without wiping the install I already have for my work documents on this OS?

Manach wrote:

But the link earlier, for Mint 17, being based off Ubuntu 14.04, showed the launch bar on the bottom..

How can a newbie install Mint, without wiping the install I already have for my work documents on this OS?

Mint is built on Ubuntu's base package repositories but uses different "desktop environments" which adhere more to the traditional "desktop metaphor". It's one of the reasons people prefer it to straight Ubuntu.

Most newbie-friendly Linux distros these days have a very nice installer wizard which very clearly spells out your options when it detects you have an OS already on your hard drive. Mint is one of those distros, just look up some screenshots of its installer and you'll get what I mean.

If you're scared of making changes to your hard drive too quickly, I suggest getting VirtualBox and installing Mint there (or whatever Linux distro you want to check out).

Bubs14 wrote:
Manach wrote:

But the link earlier, for Mint 17, being based off Ubuntu 14.04, showed the launch bar on the bottom..

How can a newbie install Mint, without wiping the install I already have for my work documents on this OS?

Mint is built on Ubuntu's base package repositories but uses different "desktop environments" which adhere more to the traditional "desktop metaphor". It's one of the reasons people prefer it to straight Ubuntu.

Most newbie-friendly Linux distros these days have a very nice installer wizard which very clearly spells out your options when it detects you have an OS already on your hard drive. Mint is one of those distros, just look up some screenshots of its installer and you'll get what I mean.

If you're scared of making changes to your hard drive too quickly, I suggest getting VirtualBox and installing Mint there (or whatever Linux distro you want to check out).

VirtualBox is how I got addicted to Linux. At the time, I wasn't 100% convinced I could do my everyday work there, so I had to keep Outlook, etc, at the ready on my Win7 system. Now, with VirtualBox, you can provide extra CPU cores, etc.

You can also install the guest add-ons, which will allow you to take the VM full screen at native resolution, so you can nearly forget you are running on an underlying OS. So I would boot into Windows, open Outlook, boot my VM, go full screen, and remember to check outlook once every couple hours.

Note: Just be sure to give your setup more than the minimum required HDD space, because, once you get comfortable, it can get tight real quick.

trueheart78 wrote:

Note: Just be sure to give your setup more than the minimum required HDD space, because, once you get comfortable, it can get tight real quick.

I always put on the dynamic sizing option, and then also select two or three times the minimum recommendation.

I've never used VirtualBox, but with VMWare, dynamic-sized disks are extremely slow. The single biggest performance tip I know for a VMWare image is to pre-allocate your disk space, ideally as a single file. With dynamic disks, most VMs will feel very sluggish, but with preallocated, it will feel almost native most of the time.

That'll give you about 20 megs/second, which is fine for normal use... if you're in a very heavy I/O situation, you can set a disk to 'persistent mode', which is where VMWare doesn't save any undo information; if the VM writes to disk, it's instantly and permanently committed. That improves I/O a fair bit, but I forget by how much.

I don't usually find VM state snapshot and rollback all that interesting a feature for my own use, so I prefer the speedup of persistent disks.

Just a note that the free, self-paced edX course, LFS101x: Introduction to Linux, is now available.

I put Mint XFCE on an HP-110 netbook last weekend. It had gotten a nasty virus that even messed up the recovery partition. Option 1 was to order a boot stick from HP, or just go with linux.

Compared to Windows 7 Starter, the smaller Mint install was more responsive and I couldn't believe Mint's USB transfer rate compared to W7. I put 8GB of backup pics/docs on a thumb drive because Samba was being a pain in the ass (trying to share a network drive with W7). Full W7 with an intel Xeon quad core, 8GB of Ram, took 20-30 minutes to load an 8GB flash drive.... Linux Mint XFCE on a NETBOOK copied it to the 5200RPM Sata in 10 minutes...

I was so pissed at windows explorer lol. Seriously though... I spent 3 hours trying to get Samba to explore the network and it kept asking me for a password to access "workgroup". I tried 3 different samba conf templates from Mint's forums. I did read the default file explorer in Mint didn't work right with network shares.

I knew enough about linux networking to turn Ubuntu into a video streamer for home security using VLC and a webcam, but I couldn't get Mint to find a shared folder.

trueheart78 wrote:

Just a note that the free, self-paced edX course, LFS101x: Introduction to Linux, is now available.

I thought it was supposed to have started. I wonder if I missed my email. They sent me the one for the preparation doc.