SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
I've been using MacOSX as my primary desktop since the days of Rhapsody. But I always had Linux virtual machines running on occasions. A dwindling number of machines at home were running Linux, most notably a couple of Raspberry Pi and a Synology Diskstation. And when I installed Linux, I usually went for Ubuntu, which did a good job polishing the user experience. The build ring for Tao3D includes a number of virtual machines running several major distros for testing purpose, but it's been quite inactive for a while, and repairing it is on my short-term to-do list.
Working for Red Hat, I thought I had to use Fedora as my primary desktop. And the experience has been a bit underwhelming so far, unfortunately. In just three days, I managed to render a Mac Book Pro unbootable in OSX, had several different issues with skippy or laggy mouse cursors and even non-responsive keyboards, had a driver crash attempting to access my home Wi-Fi, found out the hard way that NFS performance is just horrible, and had to use Google for trivial things way too often.
I complained several times on this blog about what I perceived as a degradation of OSX software quality since 10.6, but this experience with Linux puts all this in some serious perspective.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Francis on Friday December 23 2016, @08:51PM
I'd give mint a shot, it's got generally good software supporters and I haven't had much trouble with it.
Except for Bluetooth which is still an unworkable mess if you want to use a headset for telephony.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @08:56PM
Mint has long been a security disaster and frankly I think people are batshit bonkers to keep recommending it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:40AM
It is the same reason people recommended Macs back in the day, and Chromebooks and iPads today, they are seen as easy to use. For many people, that is the first and only concern they have. Hence why many basic steps companies could take to secure IoT devices aren't taken but the GUIs sure are shiny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:57AM
Chromebooks run Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:25AM
Even though I grant that, what does that have to do with my point? I was answering why people recommend Mint, which is its ease of use compared to setting up most distros, including its forefathers, Ubuntu and Debian.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:09PM
Mint has a dependency on network-manager.
I have now downloaded slackware for testing (but have not installed it yet).
It is relatively free of Redhat software.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday December 23 2016, @11:40PM
Linux Mint has a few variants (Cinnamon, MATE, LMDE). Can't be arsed to check but perhaps not all of them have network-manager.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:54AM
XFCE does not have that dependency.
Sorry, I guess I meant Cinnamon has the dependency.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:51AM
It's pretty much trivial to disable it. It's like two commands and it won't run anymore.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday December 23 2016, @09:33PM
Mint choked hard during the install. If it can't even install itself, I can only imagine the horrors I'd have to deal with if it did install. Using Mint is like dating Oriental women, that is, those who recommend it have never tried it themselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 23 2016, @09:39PM
My girlfriend is Chinese by way of Malaysia and we're doing fine :) Sorry to mess up your data set. Of course we're both women so for all I know that isn't in your sample set so...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @03:00AM
> like dating Oriental women, that is, those who recommend it have never tried it themselves.
Your problems with "oriental women" are probably caused by whatever makes you think calling someone "oriental" is acceptable.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday December 24 2016, @08:41AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:12PM
What do you mean, "words have meanings" [thefreedictionary.com]?
Sarcasm aside, has any of the professionally offended class argued that she shouldn't prefer this word?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:32PM
Yeah. Referring to a people using the name of their continent can be construed as an insult.
-A Canadian
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07PM
I can't imagine why you would think dating oriental women is not to be recommended. I dated many asian women (and many other kinds of women, too) and wound up marrying one. We have two beautiful, intelligent kids now. And i dated them and her not because they were asian but because they were cute and intelligent. The girl i married's first words to me that the party we were at was like the bar scene from Mos Eisley; right then and there i knew she was a keeper.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:26PM
We have two beautiful, intelligent kids now. And i dated them
Now there are some experiences I would'nt want to share...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:46PM
I use Fedora for my gaming/media rig. Fedora 23 was great; just upgraded to Fedora 25 this week and had some issues with Wayland, but I haven't had any problems since reverting back to X11.
I had initially intended to install Ubuntu on that machine, but I couldn't even make it through the installer without the thing locking up and dying -- and even if it had worked, the installer is missing so many options it wouldn't have been configured right. Looked into it further, found those were well known bugs in the installer, and that Canonical was apparently more concerned with meeting the arbitrary release date than publishing functional software. Spent a week trying to get that working, gave up, had Fedora up and running and fully configured in two or three hours.
And for a system like that, Mint compared to Ubuntu is all downsides. Sure, it's lightweight, but when you're putting it on a brand new gaming rig that doesn't really matter. The default UI is marginally less insane, but I've hated Gnome for decades so I don't particularly care which version of that Fischer-Price trash it's based on ;) And of course there's the security issues that others have already mentioned.
So that's how I ended up on Fedora. IIRC, I also briefly tried OpenSUSE, but found Fedora to have better out of the box hardware/software support. I generally run Antegros on my main laptop, but didn't really want rolling release on a media/gaming PC.