Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the ymmv dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

I installed five flavours of Linux on my new laptop: One month on, here's what I've learned

It's been a month since I wrote about getting a new HP Pavilion 14 laptop and loading Linux on it. My experience with it so far has been extremely good – it has done exactly what I wanted, I haven't had any trouble with it, I have used it, traveled with it, updated all of the various Linux distributions I loaded on it, and even added another distribution to it.

First, I broke one of my own basic rules – never travel with only a new and untested laptop. I left for a three-week-plus vacation in the US the day after my previous posting. I used the laptop pretty much every day during the trip. and never had a problem of any kind. It was fast and reliable, suspend/resume on closing/opening the lid worked perfectly.  Battery life is extremely good – I've never actually managed to run the batteries completely out, but I can certainly say that they are good for 6-8 hours depending on your use.

[...]

I kept it up to date as I was traveling (to be honest, that also breaks one of my personal rules – don't risk updates on your only laptop while traveling). That means openSUSE Tumbleweed got hundreds of updates; Debian, Fedora and Manjaro got a fair number as well, and I updated Linux Mint from 19.2 Beta to the final 19.2 release, all without problems.

I also decided to install Ubuntu 19.04 on it one evening when I had a bit of extra time. That turned out to be just as easy as the other distributions I had already installed – download the ISO, dump it to a USB stick and then boot that and run the installer. As with the other distributions it didn't recognize the Realtek Wi-Fi card, but I was able to correct that the same way, and using the same downloads, as I had already done with Linux Mint and Debian. The one small problem that I ran into I already knew about, that Ubuntu and Linux Mint have a directory name conflict in the EFI boot directory. I avoided that by creating a tiny EFI partition specifically for the Ubuntu installation.

[...] While I was traveling I was asked by several friends who keep up with my blog if I regretted having wiped Windows 10 from this laptop unnecessarily (see the comments on my previous post for details). My answer was a very clear 'no', there was not a single situation where I needed or wanted to boot Windows, and I was happy to have the additional disk space.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:38AM (9 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:38AM (#883468) Homepage

    Last time I tried Gnome, suddenly Win10 looked good... so did forks in my eyes...

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=1, Funny=2, Disagree=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:19PM (8 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:19PM (#883623) Journal
    Unfortunately it seems to have become the default in a lot of distress, same as systemd. At one point I'm going to have to go back to FreeBSD. It's not like people with low vision want a GUI with the craptastic "whole UX experience."
    --
    SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:50PM (7 children)

      by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:50PM (#883702) Homepage

      I've had no luck getting any of the 'modern' BSDs to run, at least not on the middle-aged hardware. Should probably try again on the "new" hardware (only 5 years old! Better grade of dumpster. :)

      After assloads of distro testing (love your wordo, Gnome variants *should* be called distress not distros!) the one that Just Worked the best and annoyed me least was PCLinuxOS, with either Trinity (XP-like) or KDE (beaten until it too resembles XP, what's with the fucking awful flat white interfaces everywhere? Brutalism for computers??) And one of the major criteria was "can be set up so my eyes don't bleed" with no damn glare-white workspaces. I understand the arguments about systemd (which btw PCLOS doesn't use, and it doesn't come in Gnome either!) but since I just want to USE the damn desktop, so long as it doesn't fuck things up, it's not high on my list.

      And yeah, what good is the "whole UX experience" if you can't see the damn thing? I can't imagine giving a flat white desktop, with flat pastel micro-controls and nearly-hidden hamburger menus, to any of my low-vision clients. They'd be like -- where the hell IS everything? who hid all my shit??

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:17PM (6 children)

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:17PM (#883750) Journal

        After 5-6 years of not being able to code, and mostly not being able to use a computer, I'm (probably temporarily)_able to see well enough to make out white text on a black background.

        I had plenty of time to think of what's wrong, from "the flat look" - Google's material design is totally shit when it comes to people with low vision - to screen layouts, fonts, etc.

        Remember those old DOS programs - 80 columns by 25 lines? They look decent on a 26" screen. So does mc. And links/lynx. The feature size of modern serif fonts is a hindrance when trying to read through blurry lenses and diseased retinas. So the the whole variable-spaced font thing. Even regular users can't tell the difference between BankOfAmerica and BankOfArnerica (that's an A-r-n in the second one) in a graphical browser. Not using monospace fonts "because they don't look cool" is what enabled North Korea and other spammers to make billions (NK got 2 billion at last report).

        At one point I tried to find a font that met all the criteria - monospace, small caps for lowercase for legibility (lowercase script is a modern invention, after all, and maybe we need to rethink it), but the only one I could find had serifs galore - just too busy to actually work.

        I'll share the results of my research when my low vision utilities are further along, because screen readers are a kluge.

        --
        SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @09:00PM

          by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 22 2019, @09:00PM (#883785) Homepage

          Wow, sorry to hear your vision went down the crapper. Hope it's stable and gets no worse.

          Yep, I fondly recall 80x25 (and still see it on my own 27" monitor when my DOS-only box is hooked up), and also not-so-fondly swearing at ATI vidcards because they had their own ideas about a DOS screen font, and used something narrow and illegible. That's pretty rough to be constrained to in this modern era, where designers with young eyes and no need to use their own creations make teeny tiny controls for teeny tiny eyes.

          And I too hate fonts that promote visual confusion. What's worse, those always seem to be tightly kerned, to maximize the potential for misreading.

          One of the problems with low vision is that it's not all the same. Friend who is blind in one eye and can't see outta the other is so nearsighted her total visual depth of field is about 3 feet -- but she also has microvision (her working eye is essentially a low-power microscope). She needs not only high contrast, but also very small print with no confusable elements.

          --
          And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
        • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday August 26 2019, @02:13PM (4 children)

          by Reziac (2489) on Monday August 26 2019, @02:13PM (#885637) Homepage

          Hey, have you tried the ADRIANE text to speech engine?

          Couple years ago I tried Knoppix-Adriane, and the screen reader worked *really* well, even on an old Core2Duo (in fact the only problem I noticed was that I couldn't figure out how to disable it!) Looks like it should be available for anything-Debian, dunno about other distros.

          http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html [knopper.net]

          Sources:
          http://www.openblinux.de/de/index.php [openblinux.de]

          Yeah, maddening compared to being able to just READ the screen, but still, if you haven't tried it, might be worth a shot.

          --
          And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
          • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:53PM (3 children)

            by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:53PM (#886389) Journal
            Tried it, it was awful, which is a pity because I was using knoppix running off a DVD as my main district after the 17th hard drive failure (box originally had 4 hard drives, but none of them - all seagatea made in the old maxtor factory, or their many RMA replacement drives, lasted even a year, and half were DOA or died within an hour.
            --
            SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
            • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday August 28 2019, @05:44AM (2 children)

              by Reziac (2489) on Wednesday August 28 2019, @05:44AM (#886659) Homepage

              Oh gods, THOSE drives... at least until they ran out of new old stock, they weren't actually Seagates, they were rebadged Maxtors, of the infamous sudden death syndrome. (Bad logic boards.) Which got a lot worse toward the end. I'd never liked Seagate (saw too many die of seized bearings) so missed that debacle in my own hardware. Did get a few into the User Group as salvage (I was the hardware dude), and they didn't last for shit. Got to where when I saw a Maxtor case (regardless of the label) it just went into the pile to be scrapped.

              --
              And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
              • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 29 2019, @01:42AM (1 child)

                by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 29 2019, @01:42AM (#887106) Journal
                At least the magnets were fun. But that's about it.
                --
                SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
                • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 29 2019, @07:56AM

                  by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 29 2019, @07:56AM (#887203) Homepage

                  Sometimes the platters were useful for wind chimes. And I kept a platter in my travel kit as an unbreakable mirror.

                  Yep, that and the magnets about exhausts the list of Maxtor/Seagate virtues.

                  Tho to be fair, I have a 40GB actual-Seagate with 85,000 hours on it, only retired for being too cramped. But that one is a freak.

                  --
                  And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.