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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:21PM (4 children)
Yeah, no thanks.
If the original link is not a slideshow I apologize, but I ran across that link a couple days ago and page 1 was "I ran Linux in 5 flavors", page 2 was "North Korea yadda yadda yadda"
Sorry, when the first website you want us to compare Linux distros to is the Nork's, then, well, I only have so many seconds of life and any spent on that shit is time I could have been committing Brady Bunch trivia to memory.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:29PM (3 children)
TFA is basically "I ran Linux on my laptop and it works fine" which is hardly news.
The guy also went overseas on holiday and spent one evening installing Ubuntu. Seriously? I though I was a bit of a geek, but what a waste of time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)
So, how many children did Alice have?
Got better things to waste brain cells on that Linux distros I'll never install.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:24AM
I believe Alice Nelson had none.
She did marry Sam the Butcher (sounds like a good horror title there) in a reunion movie but I don't think they expanded her story-line in the second series.
My parents were huge fans of The Brady Bunch, Gilligans Island, My Favorite Martian and My Mother the Car.
Which of course meant in the pre-internet one family TV era, that you ended up seeing them all. Fortunately they were also fans of The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and Star Trek.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:00AM
They don't call it "Anything can happen Thursday" for nothing.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:42PM (5 children)
I'm not opposed to SN getting this kind of thing, because it's a watermark: linux on a laptop is no longer a process where one goes to forums, one can simply install five versions and roll.
Except?
Except that he had to know how to use bug-fixing wifi drivers? That he could share between distros, but how to get it in the first place without 'net? And except that the BIOS/UEFI config did bug, but it happened to bug in a way he liked (it rejected a fresh Ubuntu install's attempt to set itself as default boot).
So what have we learned?
-this author is not a great writer
-Linux on a laptop has gotten pretty easy
-yes you will still need to visit forums to get wifi and bios working, still? :(
Conclusion: znet isn't paying writer well, linux is linux.
(Score: 5, Informative) by progo on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:58AM (2 children)
Linux is full of "except…" for casual users.
Last week I bought a USB SSD. I quickly found out when I plug it into my Linux netbook, Trim doesn't work; you need to be an advanced user to determine this. If you don't use Trim on an SSD in regular use, you might wear it out faster than normal.
It took me a week of on and off searching before I found the answer on Arch Linux Wiki: the kernel seems to have a whitelist for enabling Trim on a USB→SATA bridge. There is of course no GUI for this where you can say "I swear the ad said it works with Trim!" I'm glad I was eventually able to fix it on my own without calling the vendor for help.
More details: https://www.glump.net/howto/desktop/enable-trim-on-an-external-ssd-on-linux [glump.net]
Given experiences like that, who can recommend desktop Linux to someone who's not a engineer or some kind of advanced control freak user?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:56AM (1 child)
How many non-engineer types do you know that buy external SSD drives? By the time the clueless start buying them en masse, trim will be mainstream.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:11AM
I have had one now for 3yrs. Nice 1TB, trim is not an issue that it made out to be, it just improves performance since 128KB blocks are clear and waiting. The controller of SD is the critical part to rotate stock from time to time. Almost like DRAM needed in the past.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:54PM
> Conclusion: znet isn't paying writer well, linux is linux.
Bzzzzt.
Conclusion: zdnet needs as many pages as possible to run ads on. clickbait matters!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:24PM
no, realtek is a sick fucking joke. go visit their website and see what pros they are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by chewbacon on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:42AM
I haven't had the least of a problem running Linux on a laptop since 2003. Yawn. Get of my lawn. Let me know if you get MacOS on it - now that's a challenge!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:32AM (10 children)
Anything with Gnome, system and wayland will randomly change screen orientation with no obvious way to disable that behavior. Garbage.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:38AM (9 children)
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:19PM (8 children)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:54AM (1 child)
TFA is merely a plug for HP Pavilion laptops.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:55PM
Once again, the real blame should be on: Advertising.
It's already evil. But it is pure evil when it disguises ads as informative articles.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:06PM (5 children)
I applaud your tenacity ;-)
Any chance you could get all your non-distro based mods (e.g getting wifi configured) into a Dockerfile that can apply to a new machine?
Make sure you use "FROM $DISTRO:$VERISON" and that means what ever you are doing is available for that distro, and the paths that get changed on the host system can be mounted e.g. "-v $HOST/$PATH:$CONTAINER/$PATH" .
If Linux users did this more, we might increase the availability of laptops running, as I prefer this method to naked scripts...
My $0.02
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:54PM (4 children)
Since I have no idea what you're talking about :) ... is this kinda like .INF files, except for linux?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 22 2019, @07:16PM (3 children)
so try this.
1) create Dockerfile
2) make first line "FROM $DISTRO:$VERISON" e.g. FROM ubuntu:18.04
3) make second line "apt-get update && apt-get -y install wget $STUFF" change STUFF for anytools you needed to solve the problem
3) add "RUN " to do what needs to be done to the system. e.g download something, edit etc....
4) last line "ENTRYPOINT /bin/bash" so it will run and give you a shell
So let's build this: "docker build -t myhack . " this gives you an image named "myhack".
Let's run this image and mount our HOST files so the image can edit
"docker run --rm -v $HOSTPATH:$HOSTPATH"
The code inside the docker will mod the code on your system and apply whatever patches are needed.
Anyone else want to help out?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:38PM (2 children)
My confusion was more fundamental... as in "what is Docker?"
[goes off, roots around]
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3204171/what-is-docker-docker-containers-explained.html [infoworld.com]
https://takacsmark.com/getting-started-with-docker-in-your-project-step-by-step-tutorial/ [takacsmark.com]
Ah. So this is a configure-once, apply-everywhere solution?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 22 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)
yes, pretty useful for portability and containers etc...
the best thing is the "layers" that it uses are pretty efficient so you can mix and match volumes (ie. layers) in many interesting ways.
I've had to hack together wifi for linux laptops with binary windoze drivers and it was always a pain.
But now the world has docker, it pretty much gives one person's solution to everyone!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 23 2019, @01:37AM
Nice. Sounds very useful. Should save a lot of duplication of effort.
Perhaps this sort of cross-everywhere packaging will eventually become the norm? (what with flatpak etc.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:14PM (2 children)
Who else remembers 386BSD?
I remember when Linux fit on a floppy diskette; I think it was 1993.
I've been using FreeBSD since the early to mid-1990s. I knew Jordan Hubbard back in the 1980s. And his mom.
Over the years I have gravitated towards Thinkpads. I've gone through generation after generation of Thinkpads. When I was done I passed them on to my kids. I think I have maybe a dozen Thinkpad TP600s in storage, gathering dust, and another dozen or so slightly less old Thinkpads. Power supplies galore.
A few years ago I acquired some Thinkpad X61s. They are small but powerful enough for my needs. The idea was that I would have redundant laptops so that if something happened I could just move the hard drive to another laptop (something I've had to do two or three times over the past few decades).
I've been using X for over 30 years. I remember when tvwm(1) was first released. I remember when olvwm(1) was released. I was pleased as punch when I found that someone had resurrected olvwm(1) and placed it in the ports tree. I love a giant virtual desktop that can be stretched to meet my needs. But for some reason, the market didn't like it. So it goes.
So, anyway, I'd been running FreeBSD 11.1, but I knew it was woefully out of date and I couldn't update the software without upgrading.
I checked out FreeBSD 11.2 but I knew that it would be obsolete in a few months, too.
I tried booting FreeBSD 11.3 but it asked me for my ZFS password instead of booting a conventional upgrade screen and I found that discomforting, for some reason - I guess it was because I had already backed up my laptop and was emotionally prepared to do a complete rebuild of everything and was unprepared to be offered an upgrade path (if that's what it was).
(I don't trust upgrade paths, mostly. As a systems administrator, it's rare that I have seen an upgrade work seamlessly. They always leave crap lying around. I advise everyone to delete and reinstall. Keep it simple.)
In parallel, I'd been trying out FreeBSD 11.2, 11.3, and 12.0 on the Raspberry Pi, but because those are Level 2 machines they don't get a lot of love from the FreeBSD team - freebsd-update didn't work, packages weren't available, etc.
And so I reinstalled from scratch, using FreeBSD 11.2's CDROM ... rebuilt my DBAN'd hard drive's ZFS ... then, used freebsd-update to update to 11.3. It worked just fine.
Now, for the past year or so I had been punishing myself with Gnome3. And like many others, I hated it. But that's where I started in my quest for an upgraded desktop, because everything was tuned for Gnome3.
The newest release of Gnome3 was a dog. Things would freeze up, menus would come up as completely black squares, xterms would come up as completely black squares. I couldn't see anything. I tried a few times. I ran Xorg -configure. I tweaked settings. But, you know, I've been dealing with X Windows since, like, 1986, and I know what a deep tar pit it can be. I didn't want to go there.
So I tore the machine down and reinstalled everything again, upgraded, installed my firewall ... then, I tried KDE. But I saw the same thing happening; blacked-out menus and blacked-out applications. I know enough to recognize when I'm being shown the wrong bit plane, and so I knew it was a library issue - some library that both Gnome3 and KDE depended upon. Besides, I didn't really want to be Konquered by KDE. So I kept looking.
I tore the machine down and reinstalled it from scratch and tried Xfce. Couldn't even get it to start.
So I tore it down again and tried MaTE. Success! The MaTE desktop worked nicely. No black screen of death. Why, one of my apps hiccuped, and I saw a screen with some text on it, as the X server crashed, and then restarted itself, and came back to life without losing any data or context. Now, THAT is some good coding.
In closing, I'd like to note that a frightening number of FreeBSD's ports no longer have maintainers, and it seems like the FreeBSD Project is losing headcount. This may be a contributing factor to some of the problems I saw with FreeBSD. Lack of coders, and, also, lack of testers.
I attribute the lack of contributors to the decaying Internet economy. We spent most of our lives building a free and open source world as a prototype for a free and open human environment. Predators came along and took the software we wrote and used it to build huge corporations which gave back exactly nothing and then, to add insult to injury, all of the American employees were replaced by people from India, and the software we wrote began to be used to track us and our political activities.
Now these greedy dickheads are starting to see the bottom of the well that they pumped dry and they are all crying, "Where is my free software?"
Meanwhile, I and those my age have been unemployed for the better part of a decade, and UNDER-employed for the better part of TWO decades.
I think it's all going to crash and burn soon. Download your software while you can. Keep your RAID array on a UPS. Collect spare parts.
~childo
PS: Some people may think I am crazy to rebuild my machine from scratch, time after time, and question my sanity. But I like watching machines boot. I like reading their messages. I like watching backups run to completion. I like watching files be restored from tape. I like installing operating systems. I prefer command-line interfaces to GUIs any day. Booting computers is more educational than watching TV. And it's a peaceful way to spend my time - drinking coffee, surfing the Internet, reading books and installing software ... perfectly.
More folks should try it. Quit seeking instant gratification. Enjoy the pleasure of a job well done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:17PM
There's not a lot of point in installing four Linux releases. They're all running the same code base. The only thing that might be different is the kernel (you can compile that yourself, and turn options on and off, yourself, you don't need to install a while new Linux to change your kernel) ... the package manager ... and the desktop.
~childo
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:05PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.