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I need to install a new Linux/Gnu OS soon. The present one, Linux Mint (Mate) Debian edition no longer fills my needs. I run 4 screens with 3 X sessions. Mate worked great for this, then an update broke it to one screen. I tried Cinnamon but it won't even start on multiple X sessions. XFCE works but with some serious drawbacks although that may be caused by my current system. Enlightenment actually worked well until it started crashing and I had to restore the settings file. When it finally crashed so nothing got it to run again I gave up on it.
I need a OS with multimedia support, the ability to install programs that may not be in the repositories ( Mythtv ), and multi X screen support. I am also looking for a file manager that has something like Gnome scripts. I have fair command line skills. I presently have Nvidia cards but I will go shopping if I have to. I might try Xinerama but I usually watch one screen while switching the other 2's desktops. Also not having a menu on all screens would be a pain.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:39AM (7 children)
Picking a distro can be tough. There are hundreds. Distrowatch is good for a list.
Anyway, for multiple monitor setups, perhaps a heavyweight desktop environment such as KDE or Gnome is best. Can ask Distrowatch to list only distros with KDE based desktops, or other criteria. A quick choice is Ubuntu, which defaults to Gnome, or Kubuntu for Ubuntu with the KDE desktop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:22PM (4 children)
Ubuntu 18 broke the multiscreen feature
I start with a clean install
- two screens plugged in (vga, hdmi) - start up and get blank screens until I unplug the vga cable - back to normal- then I plug in vga and system then correctly detects and works with both monitors -- until I reboot at which time I have to go through the vga unplug/replug process
2019 technology is absolute junk - Ubuntu 16 did handle multiple screens correctly
I can't put linux anything on my parents computer because ubuntu updates are not completely unattended as it will sometimes ask multiple choice questions about grub -- idk, just use the same config that was there 2 seconds ago?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:45PM
For your parents' computer, it's simple. Just don't automatically update. Turn that feature off. Maybe don't update at all. I do a manual update when I visit, try to keep Firefox current, if nothing else.
And yeah, I know what you mean about newer versions. I was not happy with Lubuntu 19.04. They made a major change under the hood from 18.10: switched from LXDE to LXQT. It's not near as polished.
Why not just stick with Ubuntu 16, if it was working for you? It's long term, and still supported. One other thing you can do, if you need a feature from a newer kernel, is roll your own and run Ubuntu 16 on top of that. If you try that, use "make localmodconfig". Save you a lot of time figuring out which modules to include.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:49PM
unattended-upgrade shouldn't ask you anything about the grub menu when properly configured. If you are having problems, it might be a regression or you are using your own script. Regardless, you can set DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive and set the dpkg settings to use confold or confnew or whatever you choose as ubuntu will trash it anyway.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:21PM
there is no such thing as "ubuntu 18" you retarded windows-using fuck.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:09PM
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/i-switched-my-grandmother-to-slackware-any-suggestions-4175664620/ [linuxquestions.org]
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:41PM
There are hundreds, but there certainly aren't hundreds of user friendly distros. The reason for the hundreds of distros is, because they fill a particular niche. Whether that's one that someone's carved out, because they felt like it or had a need. Now, if you count different "distros" as Ubunutu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, etc . . . then sure there's a bunch of user friendly distros. They're just essentially all the same. Distros like MXLinux which is based on Debian go through enough processing that you're not going to be getting the same experience as the thing it's based on. Distrowatch is definitely a great list to start with.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:00PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:45AM (14 children)
https://www.howtogeek.com/265900/everything-you-can-do-with-windows-10s-new-bash-shell/ [howtogeek.com]
Seriously, it seems to me that every time Microsoft puts out a crappy release the Desktop Linux saboteurs make Desktop Linux even crappier...
This doesn't really sound better than MS Windows does it?:
Anyone gonna blame the submitter for this?
Sadly for desktop UIs there doesn't seem to be much real progress in more than half a century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:56AM (12 children)
If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:07AM (1 child)
> If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
So we really are going to blame the submitter for fixing it ?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:21AM
As usual in such discussions, my statement referred to the quote directly preceding it. In this case I quoted you complaining about the lack of “real progress” in UIs.
Of course, the Mint update has broken things for the OP. Obviously because the maintainers changed something; if nothing had changed, nothing had broken. A change which they probably considered progress, otherwise why would they have changed it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:28PM
All engineers know: If it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:52PM (4 children)
If it ain't broken, don't fix it."
This. This truly is the curse of computing. WinXP was a decent system, so they had to "improve" it with Vista. Win7 was solid, so they had to "improve" it with Win8, and then with the spyware that is Win10. Linux: Gnome 2 was stable and well-liked, so they improved it. The same happened with KDE. We won't mention Unity. MS Office and the addition of the "ribbon". The list is basically endless...
Some improvements do make sense, of course. The problem arises when programmers decide to replace perfectly functional components for no good reason, that problems mostly occur. FWIW this seems to mostly be a frontend/UX problem. It is relatively rare to have a backend component massively modified for no perceptible gain. UI components, on the other hand, seem to attract people who "know better". They seemingly don't care that their brainwave will mess up thousands or even millions of users who are familiar with the old UI.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:25PM (2 children)
All in favor of sending all UI developers to a bradley13 conference, raise their hands. Either that or put him in charge of the "re-education" camp for UI devs . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NickM on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:25PM (1 child)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:34PM
Sounds good to me, whatever might help the incessant repositioning of key features.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:02PM
Are you sure? How many Linux system components have been replaced by systemd components?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilsa on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:24PM (3 children)
The problem is that they *are* broken. Or at least, they are horribly fragile and utterly non-robust.
Everyone is so concerned about trivial nonsense like customizability and themes and other garbage, and let the truly valuable stuff get sidelined. Like robust and easy to use multi-monitor support, reliable and secure support for remote desktop capability for remote users, access to system settings, etc, and most importantly, always provide a way out in case something goes wrong. (Looking at you KDE)
Windows is a steaming pile for a great variety of reasons, but one thing you cannot say is that the GUI isn't robust. Thinking that it's reasonable for users to have to make changes to their xorg config, or to start playing around with their ~/.Xsession file is a completely unreasonable expectation and Linux will never break out of niche markets until developers grasp the idea that robustness counts for more than being able to choose how thick your window borders are.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:06PM (2 children)
Did you read the submission? I don't know what you consider robust multi-monitor support, but things breaking on update is not what I consider robust.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilsa on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)
That was my point. Too much time is spent on nonsense like pretty themes and backgrounds, and not enough is spent on providing a solid experience. And then everyone wonders why Linux is a miserable failure as a general purpose desktop OS.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:19AM
I have this very complaint across the board. All sorts of eye candy everywhere (or the inverse -- flat, white, and featureless: Brutalism for desktops); meanwhile basic usability settings are nowhere to be found. Frex, you can make the corners rounded and the window beautifully transparent, but you can't make the scrollbars big enough to grab if you have less than pixel-perfect accuracy. Oh, and let's not forget designing all the clickable controls to be so subtle and elegant that you almost can't see the damn things. AND STOP BREAKING OR REMOVING WHAT ALREADY WORKS!!!
So, for the plaintively-wailing query... I don't know about multiple monitors, but 150 distros later I wound up with PCLinuxOS/KDE, because the fewest things didn't work or annoy me. Tho I do beat on Plasma until it more or less resembles WinXP, the interface I regard as the apex of everyday usability: Breeze Dark + Oxygen + Obsidian Coast + Plastik. It is not beautiful, but it doesn't hurt my eyes and I don't have to aim at shit like it's a FPS. And it does have an automated update widget, tho you do have to click "Update". Oh, and for the purists, no systemd. [Fedora/KDE came in second, but had more petty annoyances, plus I prefer rolling if I have a choice.]
As to how 'heavy' a given DE is, someone on our forum ran a bunch of tests, and OOTB every DE came in between 260mb and 595mb; hardly a factor on tolerably modern systems.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:06PM
Gah, with the way he speaks I expect him to ask me to be his neighbor or tell me to paint a happy little tree somewhere!
I want what he's on! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:10AM (9 children)
devuan with Mate desktop is my favourite desktop environment.
it gives you good compatibility with debian packages and is no problem with Nvidia cards
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:45AM (7 children)
The problem is that a Debian update has changed something that prevents his system from working properly. You have just suggested that he use a distro that is based on Debian. I'm not sure if the problem will follow from Debian to Devuan, but there is a reasonable chance that it might. I don't suppose that he will want to go through the entire problem again when Devuan finally catches up with the latest Debian release.
Personally, I would prefer to identify the cause of the problem rather than jump to an entirely new distro, but if I am going to change then I would probably be steering away from Debian for the time being. Time to start testing various distros in a virtual environment to find which one works best for the specified configuration. Is the problem in X, is it the update to the MATE desktop, or maybe a change to a standard lib that is no longer doing what it did? Presumably the poster still has the original ISO for the previous working version - try it again to make sure that there isn't a new hardware fault which showed itself at the same time as the update.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:57AM (1 child)
Well, one would hope that at some point during the process, the emergency signal gets passed downstream, halt on update xyz123, that was a regression, wait for next patch.
In my experience, you can't always get what you want, and I rarely get what I hope for either.
"Personally, I would prefer to identify the cause of the problem rather than jump to an entirely new distro"
Now that's a bit of shockingly good advice!
The unfortunate fact is that simply switching to a different distro may run into the same problem, either immediately or relatively shortly down the road.
Understanding why it happened, that's Mott the Hoople.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:19AM
I agree. However the user's configuration is untypical from most other users and there is a chance that not many will discover the problem, and if they do it might be a low priority if only a small number of users are affected. I don't think that MythTV is supported by Debian any longer, but I could easily be wrong. MythTV do give a link to explain how to install their software and it appears to have been updated in August of this year.
Anything that the user can do to pin this bug down will be important in deciding whether there is sufficient information to even begin a bug squash.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:17AM (3 children)
Yes, Debian will do that on occasion, since neither Deb nor Ian are involved in the distro any more, and god knows who is, outside the fact they approved the Nefarious and Diabolical SystemD!!!! TenanciousD was not all that bad, as a comedy rock band, but Systemd sucks the proverbial Donkey balls, and is to be avoided at all cost. I repeat, at alll costs. You may have to go Gentoo. So be it! Or Slack! So be that. Great thing about Free Software (Do NOT get me started on the scum-bag "Business Friendly" Bruce shit of "La Dee Da, Open Source") is that it grants you freedom. And as William Wallace once said, "They can take our lives, but they canna take, our, FREEDOM!!!" Scots for free software agree. Scots for "open source" software, well, they be down the Locks, weighted, you know.
"The problem is that a Debian update has changed something that prevents his system from working properly. " Seriously, janrinok, you are going to allow crap like this on the front page, and censor the aristarchus submissions? Oh, the Huge Manatee!! !
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:36AM (2 children)
I know that your comment was partly in jest but, just to clarify for any members of our community that are fairly recent arrivals, we have never censored your submissions.
They might not get selected because you do not follow the guidelines for submissions, but we can hardly be held responsible for that. Heaven knows we have tried often enough to help you.
They might be edited but - well, that is what editors are meant to do, so that submissions comply with our stated guidelines and the aims of this site.
But we have not, do not, and will not censor our community unless instructed to do so by the appropriate legal authorities who can present the necessary legal paperwork.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:43PM
That's a lie. No, make it too lyes, the one with "never censored" and the "members of our community that are fairly recent arrivals".
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:50AM
There is no "Official Secrets Act" in the Untied States, Jan! And it is only censorship is the government does it. What happens at SN is far, far more insidious. Kind of thing only a Mangy Buzzard could pull off.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:32PM
Absolutely agree.
I'd look at xorg.conf changes, or replacement. That's one of my most important OS (non-personal) files for backups.
And as you said, something might have changed in the binaries / libs that broke the xorg.conf parameters, so again, I'd look in that direction before I change OS.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:12PM
(Score: 1) by catholocism on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:29AM
Mxlinux? It defaults to xfce, but is stupid easy to run with kde plasma instead. Been happy with it for the last month. Granted I only have 2 screens...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:30AM (10 children)
I've had a situation where I wanted to run 2 X screens (1 for my monitors, 1 for my projector) and found that virtually all modern desktop environments are completely worthless at handling this. It seems that they seem to think that "We have xrandr now, X screens is old school and deprecated so we don't need to support that." Unfortunately xrandr isn't the endlösung to everything multimonitor. It's quite nice as long as the applications play nice with it, but a RPITA when they don't, and decide to open up a window (or even worse, a dialog or popup) on the projector. No. I do not want to turn on the projector, wait a minute for the screen to brighten, just to be able to locate your dumbass popup. >:-( I recall GIMP being a particularly nasty program to use in this respect.
Anyway, to answer your question, I found that:
1) The best distro for trying all this stuff out was Gentoo, simply because if you can't configure it in Gentoo, you can't configure it in any other distro either. (Xfce worked decently well with 2 X screens, after some fiddling, if I recall.)
2) Even in Gentoo nothing really worked well enough to make me satisfied - I ended up using KDE + xrandr, because KDE at least offers a tiny desktop "minimap" which allows you to drag offending windows to the right place, without actually seeing them. This may or may not be enough for you - it was the least bad compromise for me.
3) If 3 X screens are an absolute must for you, you may need to be prepared to ditch anything that calls itself a desktop environment, and go back to plain old window managers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:25AM (1 child)
You find it unfortunate that xrandr doesn't kill everything multimonitor?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Arik on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:52AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:15AM
I currently have 3 monitors and usually a window opens on the wrong one only if my pointer is on the wrong monitor when the window is created (and there aren't any rules for it to go to a specific output or workspace).
Except Cura which, after being open for a while, will open its menu at 0+0 on another monitor to the main window until the window is floated and then unfloated, where it will work normally for another 24 hours or so..
I even used to have 5 monitors with minimal "wrong monitor" issues. Perhaps the key here is the window manager, which has been i3 for both situations for me.
Also, any reason you weren't turning off the projector output in xrandr while the projector was off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:35PM (1 child)
FYI, I've done multiple X screens with Awesome, seemed to work fine. Note the common link between this and another reply's suggestion of i3 -- they're both (primarily) tiling wms.
Now I'm not sure a tiling wm is what you want, but there's a correlation between using X screens and using tiling wms, so you're more likely to find it working properly there. If you really don't want a tiling wm, maybe try some old-school wms like FVWM2; I doubt that's been taken over by CADT [jwz.org] yet.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:20PM
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:41PM (4 children)
The whole projector thing irritates me. I've always thought that a projector or any other similar display output, regardless of OS, should NEVER be part of the desktop. Ridiculous. It should be its own thing, never to be grabbed by anything except one application that writes to it.
That said, I've used some presentation software that seems to take full control of the projector output such that nothing else will show on it (no mouse, nothing), so I'm glad someone figured that out.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:23PM (3 children)
And how shall the computer figure out that the display device you just connected is a projector, rather than a monitor?
Not to mention that treating the projector specially would mean that you can only ever use programs with it that are specifically written for that purpose. Oh, you want to watch a YouTube video over the projector? Too bad that your browser has no projector support. Oh, you want to demonstrate your new program to the audience? Well, better add projector support to it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:04AM
Quite a snide response, going down a path based on an incorrect assumption.
Please show me where I said it has to be hard-wired or hard-coded, never to be changed?
It's simple- there should be a setting in the OS to let the USER decide on how the port is used.
And maybe you're not aware, but there is communication between the computer and display device, including good old VGA. So there could be a mechanism that recognizes the display type, and either autoconfigures or allows the USER (remember that person?) to choose.
I know, mindboggling.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 28 2019, @03:29AM (1 child)
I re-read my earlier post and I see where you misunderstood. I'm going through a lot of stress- my father passed away 10 days ago. I surely did not mean that a secondary graphics port should _never_ be used to extend a desktop. I just meant I think it's stupid that it is either a desktop extension, or unusable. There should be an option to use it as a desktop extension, or reserve it for special software, like video and slideshow projectors, or some other large-screen display. That way you never have to worry about an OS windows popping up either on a live screen, or worse, on a screen you can't get to because the resolution is out of range of the display on that port... but to change the resolution, you have to interact with that user interface widget. I've had to blindly grab around until I could find and drag it to the usable screen. Hope that makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 28 2019, @07:32AM
Yes, that way it makes more sense. But I think this should be possible by using the X multiple screen feature (that was in X11 since the very beginning, although for a different purpose), although I never actually tried. You'd assign your main screen to :0.0, and the other screen/projector to :0.1. The window manager would run on :0.0 only (thus all those windows would open up there). The special software would then in addition to :0.0 explicitly open the display :0.1 and open a single full-screen window there.
What is missing is the specialized software doing that. I think it would not be hard to write, but nobody saw the need doing it. And of course, you'd have to set up everything manually (direct editing of configuration files), as no tool I know of supports setting this up.
I'm also not convinced that sufficiently many people would want to use this configuration in order to write that specialized software or support that type of setups in the setup tools.
But then, maybe it's just a chicken-egg problem: Nobody writes software using such a setup because nobody has such a setup anyway. And nobody has such a setup because the software supporting it doesn't exist. And of course the graphical configuration tools don't support it because nobody uses that setup anyways.
My sympathies about your father; I know that situation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:56AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:58PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:59AM (3 children)
download bbqlinux
try to configure one of those wm for your use case
then boot up antix or mxlinux and try to install that wm+conf
i'd start from fluxbox
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:11AM (2 children)
Thanks for that info, Bot. bbqlinux might be just what I need, but I see it's brand new. Maybe more likely antix...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday November 27 2019, @06:28PM (1 child)
bbqlinux is stalling but it is still worthy as a demo for all kind of wm.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 28 2019, @03:33AM
Thank you for that. How about antix- you find it stable?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:27PM (4 children)
It worked fine for you... why did you upgrade? Shiny? New? Fuck that.
Once you have Linux working you should stop updating it and you won't have any problems. It's only going to get worse as the pink-haired SJWs further infest the Linux ecosystem. Their philosophy is "Who needs four-monitor X support when you can comb the source-code for microaggressions?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
Boy, I bet your relatives are really looking forward to sitting next to you at the Thanksgiving table listening to all of your interesting conversation topics.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:12PM
I think he has made a valid point. You don't HAVE to upgrade everytime a distro puts out a new version. As long as the security updates are kept current then your working system should be good to go until the next major release in many cases. He had a working system which he chose to upgrade. I would simply revert to what he had that last worked and stick with that until the bugs that accompany any new release have been ironed out.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:23PM
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:29AM
I froze my everyday install about a year ago because of a hardware-vs-kernel issue. It still works just fine for what it's used for. Eventually I'll get the new setup customized the same way and won't need the old one anymore, but meanwhile, it ain't broke, not fixing it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:50PM (2 children)
I use Fluxbox as a multi screen X11 desktop. Manual X11 configurations. No display manager, just login on console than startx.
For decades already. Changed several desktop machines and their their head configurations between 1-3 monitors many many times. Notebooks too.
It even survived migration from Gentoo Linux to FreeBSD couple of years ago.
Handcrafted config files, handcrafted menus and keyboard macros.
No shit bundled, like KDE or Gnome remote backdoors via dbus.
http://fluxbox.org/ [fluxbox.org]
It's forever.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:04PM (1 child)
An example of a very simple keyboard macro from my ./fluxbox/keys:
LeftAlt+F1 when cursor touches the desktop brings up a list of active windows (without conky's panels) and switches to selected window from that list
If a man knows what he's doing, he may do anything perfectly.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:41PM
^^
Yeah, I wouldn't call that "perfect". More like, nightmarish. Sure, I can work on getting an OS running, but I don't want to do that when I'm at home.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:40PM
Both .rpm and .deb-based distros have multimedia support, via the RPM Fusion [rpmfusion.org] (RPM) and deb-multimedia [deb-multimedia.org] (DEB) repositories, respectively.
Not sure what other multimedia software you might need, but MythTV is available via the repositories above, making updates and version synchronization between front and back ends really easy.
As for multi-monitor support, I'd say that was likely a driver/desktop environment (DE) issue rather than a distro issue. I suppose it could be a distro issue. That said, if multi-monitor support was broken for a distro and/or DE, you'd think there would a be a lot more complaining about it on the intertubes.
You can find a bunch of discussions about multi-monitor support on the relevant superuser and stackexchange sites (DDG is your friend).
What's more, most distributions can support various DEs (XFCE, Mate, Gnome, KDE, etc.) and you can generally switch between them fairly easily.
For personal use, I generally roll with Fedora (currently 30) and XFCE, which meet my needs nicely. But many folks around here use Arch, Mint, Gentoo, Devuan and/or one of the BSDs (which generally have poorer hardware support, but might meet your needs).
If you want to be in complete control, or at least make sure you are running what you want to run (and only that), you could check out LFS [linuxfromscratch.org].
Or you could just choose one or more distros from Distrowatch [distrowatch.com] and see which meets your needs the best.
Good luck. I hope you resolve your issue and find a distro that works well for you.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:49PM
I think your needs are quite special. Most people do not go beyond 2 screens (I am on two, I have 7 virtual screens though, so technically I have 14 screens, beat that). I guess most developers will have 3 screens at most. If you really want support for your use case, you need developers with that exact setup, otherwise it is guesswork whether you are supported or not. Or supply tests for the distributions to test your use-case during the packaging process (those will be disabled though, if nobody cares about the setup). In conclusion you have to motivate some developers to work on your exact setup and buying a capable developer some monitors/graphics cards would be one solution.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:02PM
Slackware
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:37PM (3 children)
MXLinux is at the top of the list on distrowatch and doesn't use systemd for it's init. I really don't know about multiple screen support, but it might be a good option to try.
They have a page on dual monitor setup, so I figure it's at least on their radar. https://mxlinux.org/wiki/hardware/dual-monitor-setup/ [mxlinux.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:05PM (1 child)
XFCE is a lot lighter than the demand-heavy KDE recommended by some (why?). But then you have the Mickey Mouse file manager, Thunar. Ok, maybe I am too used to Nemo.
I have found that Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is not all that up-to-date. I run (mostly) Mint with Cinnamon - have run 2 screens, but not four as the OP has.
From other comments it seems the MATE guys and/or Debian boyz messed something up at a point. What is new in Linuxland? It works on the devs machine, compiles ok, SHIP!
Hmm, maybe the OP should try Manjaro, from the Arch stable. But please pick a desktop flavour that is not going to cook your chips (KDE).
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:45AM
Here's the naked-install RAM usage, from a recent test done using PCLinuxOS as the base:
KDE/Plasma: 595mb
Mate: 546mb
Xfce: 516mb
LXDE: 389mb
Trinity: 294mb
Openbox: 264mb
So Xfce is really not all that much 'lighter' than KDE.
But DE is not, in my observation, the real factor. Rather, the distro itself. Frex, Mint runs rings around Ubuntu, even with the same DE (because Mint loads about a quarter as much crap, per actual count). PCLOS/KDE is far more spry than Mageia with the same KDE. And so on. In my observation this is more CPU load than memory load.
When low system resources are a problem, tho... Puppy and JWM, about as light as you can get and still be full-featured and modern.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:34PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:42PM
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-quad-desktop&num=1 [phoronix.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:43PM (4 children)
Out of curiosity, have you done any debugging to determine what might be causing the problem?
Checking out some or all of the following may help:
contents of ~/.xsession-errors
contents of /var/log/Xorg.[display#].org
output of 'lspci'
output of 'dmesg'
contents of /var/log/messages
Here are some resources that might give you some insight into the issue:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting [ubuntu.com]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/MonitorDetection [ubuntu.com]
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/ServerDebugging/ [x.org]
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159476 [archlinux.org]
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/xtruss/ [greenend.org.uk]
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XTesting/ [freedesktop.org]
Have fun!
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:29PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:04PM (2 children)
I was focusing on this:
As for Mythtv, the relevant repositories have the latest (v0.30) available, so unless you have specific hacks you need to include in your Mythtv builds, the repositories should work well for you.
As for copy/pasting between screens, is each screen a different login session/desktop (when it works), or are you sharing all four screens in one desktop session?
If it's the former, it would make sense that the copy/paste buffers wouldn't be shared, but certainly not in the latter.
Regardless, having tools/info for troubleshooting is a good thing.
Even if you're just going to move to another distro, you never know when they might come in handy.
As an aside, I run Mythtv 0.30 from the RPM Fusion [rpmfusion.org] repositories on Fedora 30 (frontend is Mate, backend doesn't run X) with a frontend using VAAPI [wikipedia.org] support enabled on a Cherry Trail SoC [wikichip.org] which renders 1080p pretty flawlessly via HDMI.
Fedora Core is *not* an LTS distro, which might be a negative for you, but there are many other distros which do have LTS versions, with both .deb and .rpm package management.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:36PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:43PM
I hope you find something that meets your needs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:37PM (5 children)
I'm probably going to get castigated for this, but if you want a *nix machine that is reasonably stable, then your best option is to get a Mac. You lose customizability, but in return you get a comparatively solid OS that doesn't give you grief. Their recent 16" MBP, while still an annoying sealed toaster, at least has a proper keyboard again and is closer to cost competitive than the garbage they've released for the past 3 years. If you can't afford the most recent model, try to look for a used 2015 MBP.
If you want to develop advanced linux skills, then by all means use Linux. But if you want to use your computer to actually get work done and don't have time to waste trying to figure out why your DE is crashing this time, and you can't stand the idea of using Windows, then a Mac is your overall best choice.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:09PM
I've been running Linux for a long time, and I haven't had issues with the DE just crashing due to poor quality software in at least a decade.
What's more, since OSX is BSD-based, as long as you have supported hardware, BSD can be pretty rock solid too.
I'm not discouraging anyone from using Mac, as there can be advantages to that, especially if one isn't technically minded. However, the idea that it's *inherently* more stable hasn't been true for some time, IMHO.
(Score: 1) by krait6 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:15AM (2 children)
If you get a Mac then the result is different grief. Users of MacOS Catalina (10.15) are reporting a lot of issues and are whining that the quality of the OS has notably dropped. I've been helping friends debug a number of issues (usually with email setups with Mail.app) where a few bugs seem to occur on 10.15 which don't on 10.14. And ... I think the effort involved to switch from Linux to Mac is not insignificant. When I last was doing some cross-platform code development and testing the code on the Mac, I found using the Mac to be a bit frustrating.
With that said, for less technical users who don't want to learn to be system administrators, I've sometimes recommended getting a Mac. For this case where the user has a fair bit of Linux desktop experience and seems more technical, this seems more like a situation where trying to figure out what the specific problem is and working it out seems more fitting.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:29AM
I never used Macs much until I had to do a short-term gig managing a lab full of macs, and they crashed enough to put me off from buying one despite that they were at the time new. I think they were iMacs, but still, if you're gonna pay a premium than it better fucking Just Work™. That was a few years ago when I was getting much better performance and less crashes from Windows 8.1 on my basic-bitch Dell lappy, and that was using a serious third-party apps and not just Safari like on the iMacs.
Compared to those iMacs, I could've just installed Linux on a basic-bitch Dell and had the same performance (better graphical performance with customization and effects) at a fraction of the cost. But generally, the really old and really new Linux distro versions fucking suck ass, but a lot of the ones in-between were flawless. But if you want to run one of the "in between" distro versions you start running into the kinds of dependency problems that package managers like .deb were supposed to fix (and did a decent job of fixing for awhile).
Some of you have some combination of patience and incentive to fiddle with your distros for hours just to get a simple feature or application working. Not me, it really kills my motivation trying that hard to get something simple working, that should just fucking work. Kernel hacking or being paid to fiddle all day makes a lot more sense, just getting 2 fucking monitors of different resolutions working, not so much.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday November 27 2019, @08:13PM
Really? That's good to know. I haven't updated to Catalina yet for numerous reasons, the big one being the loss of 32-bit app support, and won't be doing it anytime soon until the app shakedown has completed.
I'll advise people to stay away from Catalina for the time being (assuming it's an option for them). It's really unfortunate that their QA has collapsed so badly.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday November 27 2019, @06:34PM
>But if you want to use your computer to actually get work done...
AND you have money to follow apple's forced obsolescence path...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:09PM (1 child)
Gentoo + XFCE + arandr (graphical drag 'n drop display configurator) is all I've needed for 4+ years now.
...And the 3-4 years prior I just needed OpenSuse + XFCE + arandr
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:42PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:50AM
Must admit I like Rox.
(Score: 1) by krait6 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:54AM (1 child)
I haven't seen an X configuration setup that uses multiple X sessions (or haven't in so long that I've forgotten if I've ever seen this), so I'm wondering if there's some documentation that can be pointed to for it, for the specific purpose of testing setups to try to answer this question.
It might also help to know the date of the Mint + MATE breakage and what version of packages were possible culprits of the breakage, so that Mint developers reading the site could look into that. Debugging WHAT went wrong seems worthwhile, as does perhaps writing a detailed bug report concerning the package upgrade that broke the setup -- i.e. it might simply be a bug, and could perhaps get fixed if the package maintainer knows what the problem is.
I'm also wondering if it were possible to use a single X session but have multiple screens, each with their own menu bar on them, and whether that would fit your needs. Several desktop environments allow for having multiple menu bars, so it seems logical that they could be placed on multiple screens. i..e. there might be a good way of getting what you want/need, though it might not follow the same method in which this was previously done before the breakage.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Wednesday November 27 2019, @05:40AM