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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the over-to-the-community! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by krait6 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:15AM (2 children)

    by krait6 (5170) on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:15AM (#925194)

    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.

    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

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:29AM (#925207) Homepage

    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

    by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 27 2019, @08:13PM (#925443)

    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.