Replies

My strong suspicion is that Marie Antoin-della’s attitude towards gamers is, “Let them eat Xboxes.”

2 users thanked author for this post.

Bill C., Cybertooth

driftless wrote:

And try doing this with Windows: You can move a hard drive to a dissimilar system and almost always, everything works on the first boot: video, sound etc. (Full disclosure: VirtualBox has tripped over that change, but it’s easily fixed.) And may I mention that you never have to worry about activation complications.

From the days before the Lounge, here’s my anecdote on that disk-transplant trick…

1 user thanked author for this post.

driftless

AlanH wrote:

From everything I’ve heard, Peppermint OS has got to be the next distro I try out on the toybox pc.

A quick note… Trying to install Peppermint 7 from a usb stick prepared by unetbootin produced an unbootable partition. I finally got Peppermint 7 to install by burning its iso image to a dvd and installing from there. I haven’t tried alternate methods of preparing the usb stick.

Yep, I have a Sparkylinux with LXQT on the multiboot toybox pc. It has a lot of the charm of LXDE, but definitely feels not quite finished yet. As its developers acknowledge, still keeping its release number at zero point something.

So far, my Xfce machines, and one lubuntu, don’t show any perceptible impairment from the bits of KDE pulled in by installing K3B (and on some of them, KPatience and KMahjongg.) We’ll see if that changes if I get a chance to try the Krita paint program.

AlexEiffel wrote:

Funny how when reading the title I was puzzled by the enthusiasm in it.

To employ a cultural reference that may not be useful here, when I first read that title, it was in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, from Futurama. As in, “Good news, everyone! Your next delivery is to the Planet of Extreme Deadly Danger! Of Death!”

The full article is hilarious, if you have any experience with programming and programmers, and also d***ably true. There’s always plenty of energy available to write new New NEW code– and practically none for fixing, tuning, and maintaining old code. No glamour, that job’s for grunts, and so forth. And heaven forbid we should focus on the actual job that the end user wanted to accomplish in the first place.

True in programming forty years ago; still rampant now.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, Microfix

The demos I’ve seen of the KDE interface have been very impressive. Unluckily, none of my ragtag fleet of obsolete hand-me-down PCs have been up to running it. Someday…

However, I do take the penalty of installing a bunch of KDE dependencies, in order to get access to applications such as K3B on other ‘buntu distros.

I hadn’t heard of that Mint quirk before. Yeah, that would be awkward to support on my end users’ machines. I guess the goal is to keep Mint users installing only Mint-vetted applications, but sheesh! Sometimes I want a piece of software that’s a little closer to the bleeding edge, and I’m willing to accept the risks.

Ascaris wrote:

KDE has them what I consider to be the “normal” way, which is to say that OK is on the left and Cancel is on the right, like Windows. You listed them in the opposite order above, so perhaps the GNOME way is normal to you.

Heh. I suspect that’s more a matter of my being slower and less efficient at using a UI than the power users who frequent this lounge. Also, your post included the phrase “annoying reversal of the cancel and OK buttons” so I probably just echoed the last sequence that I read. 🙂

There’s been a big debate about this in Ux circles, I guess. My thought on it is this: When you ask someone for a “yes or no,” that’s the order they come in. “No or yes” just sounds odd, like you’re trying to lead them to say no, whereas “yes or no” has no such loaded meaning. If you ask if someone is Ok or not, again, OK is first, not is second. Since we read left to right, to me that means that OK or YES should be on the left (so we read it first) and NO or CANCEL should be on the right, so we read it last. GNOME has them in the opposite order, so anything that uses GNOME as a base or GTK+ likely does too. Cinnamon is like this throughout… even though it’s all backwards to me, at least it’s consistently so. When I ran Firefox from KDE, I had to catch myself before I hit the wrong button in Firefox (the most-used GTK+ program for me), since I was used to the KDE/Windows way.

Your take on it makes perfect sense to me. I think I’ve gotten away without noticing it before, because of my “inefficiency,” as I facetiously (but not entirely so) noted above.

Okay, so Firefox is a prime place to look for that dialog-box button reversal. I’ve already found a few other applications under both Xfce and LXDE that revert to Gnomish window decorations, ignoring the general theming. Easy examples are any apps with installation package names starting with “gnome-“, like the gnome-disk-utility (“Disks,” generally found under Settings or System in the menus.)

Microfix wrote:

Simce around 2012 we tried different distros on a two tier strategy, in a VM and then on a test PC if it made the cut. One of my pet hates was installing a distro and finding bloat apps that would never be used only to spend time removing and/ or replacing them.

Agreed. My approach to that flavor of distro has been to install it on a “toybox” pc and see what some of the unfamiliar applications were like. I’ve found a few alternatives and worthy supplementals that way– but I then would install just that new find on my much leaner “production” linux machine.

We were looking for stability, low resources, power, functionality and compatibility between legacy and new hardware and a good support forum. We eventually homed in on a Hybrid LXDE Peppermint OS that has a great ethos of ‘keeping the distro minimal’ and leaving the choice of apps to the end-user after installation, keeping the iso to a minimal size. Peripherals were also an important factor in our decision as this OS picked up our legacy (2003) USB scanner that others could not, straight out the box!

From everything I’ve heard, Peppermint OS has got to be the next distro I try out on the toybox pc.

I now spend more time and get more enjoyment from linux than I have done from windows over the last 3 years.

Heh. During the GWX debacle, and the era of interminable waits for Win7 updates, I would calm myself by rebooting into a ‘buntu partition and running updates. Within a couple of minutes. And without worrying about PUPs being installed by the OS provider.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Microfix

Another thought on Gparted:

If you’re an old-timey DOS & Windows user, you may remember a commercial product called Partition Magic. I used to use the heck out of that, getting my disk partitions Just So.  Also backing up entire partitions– although not to handy gadgets like USB-attached hard drives. 🙂

Anyway, when I started playing with linux, the Gparted interface & its functions were instantly familiar to me, thanks to long experience with Partition Magic.

2 users thanked author for this post.

johnf, Elly

Wow– that’s the clearest explanation of the Mint updates & stability approach that I’ve ever read! Much appreciated.

Doing some cursory experiments with the Xfce desktop I’m using right now (flipping through different combos of theme and window manager decorations), Firefox and a bunch of other programs appear to have consistent UI styling. That includes VLC, with a Qt-based interface, and K3B, KDE’s disc burning tool. It probably helps that Xfce uses its own window manager, Xfwm. I have observed some interface duality in Lubuntu, which uses Openbox (whose settings are cheerfully ignored by Firefox, et alia.)

I haven’t noticed that Cancel/OK position reversal– but, I haven’t had access to hardware capable of running the heavier KDE interface. Do you recall any of the applications that would show that up? I can currently check for that misbehavior on LXDE, Lxqt, and Xfce.

Yeah, the Nvidia stuff can be a hassle. I recently converted my main tower from 32-bit to 64-bit Xubuntu, and the screen kept going to black, randomly! Luckily I was able to get it off the generic driver and onto a proprietary Nvidia driver before it drove me (more) insane.

I’vr heard good things about Peppermint OS (out of Mint out of Ubuntu out of Debian 🙂 ) in terms of its “load and go” experience. Supposed to be fairly snappy on old hardware, too; I’ll have to try it on my old distro-testbed PC sometime.

1 user thanked author for this post.

HiFlyer

I recently rambled on about this in another topic, leading to this one, so I’ll quote myself a bit… 🙂

AlanH wrote:

For this old DOS guy (and Windows guy, from 3.1 through XP, mostly), Ubuntu with a Gnome-ish desktop environment was pretty quickly comfortable.

in 2009, that was the main Ubuntu itself; when they went to the Unity desktop environment, I moved to Xubuntu, with the XFCE desktop environment. Xubuntu is one of the “official,” first-gen derivatives of ubuntu — part of the immediate family, so to speak. I use it as my main everyday OS on a tower PC and a laptop, and have installed it for friends and family.

Why Xubuntu (and ubuntu derivatives in general)?

My xubuntu installations pretty much just do OS tasks, and otherwise stay out of my way. And even eight years ago, the ‘buntus were pretty easy for a PC hobbyist; since then, they’ve gotten closer and closer to an “end-user-grade” OS, in my (admittedly limited) experience. I have anecdotes… 8^j* They’re very good at detecting and supporting the hardware in my ragtag fleet of obsolete and not-quite-obsolete PCs. For figuring out fixes and tweaks, I can draw on a tremendous and eminently searchable archive of answered questions on the various Ubuntu forums– I just try to check the most recent answers first, as techniques change over the years and releases.

What about applications?

Most of the applications I use are either the same (Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc.) or close enough. For the remainder, I’m currently pushing harder on researching Windows in a virtual machine, and Wine, the compatibility layer (which has also gotten much better the last few years.)

I’ve also dual-booted with Windows throughout my ubuntu history. However, I’ve found it kinda nice to run a couple of Windows applications (WinSCP and IrfanView) directly in linux via Wine, without the bother of rebooting, and I’d like to see if a virtual machine can let me get a similar experience with a few of the more recalcitrant Windows programs.

 

3 users thanked author for this post.

AlexEiffel, MrJimPhelps, HiFlyer

For this old DOS guy (and Windows guy, from 3.1 through XP, mostly), Ubuntu with a Gnome-ish desktop environment was pretty quickly comfortable.  Currently, that’d be distros like Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, Xubuntu (my personal go-to), Kubuntu, and a whole zoo of derivatives and respins like the Mint family, Linux Lite, and on and on and on…

My xubuntu installations pretty much just do OS tasks, and otherwise stay out of my way. And even eight years ago, the ‘buntus were pretty easy for a PC hobbyist; since then, they’ve gotten closer and closer to an “end-user-grade” OS, in my (admittedly limited) experience. I have anecdotes… 🙂  They’re very good at detecting and supporting the hardware in my ragtag fleet of obsolete and not-quite-obsolete PCs. For figuring out fixes and tweaks, I can draw on a tremendous and eminently searchable archive of answered questions on the various Ubuntu forums– I just try to check the most recent answers first, as techniques change over the years and releases.

Most of the applications I use are either the same (Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc.) or close enough. For the remainder, I’m currently pushing harder on researching Windows in a virtual machine, and Wine, the compatibility layer (which has also gotten much better the last few years.)

On the limited bandwidth issue, I’m not sure of the comparison. My ‘buntus (and a couple of Debian distros I’m trying out) do receive updates throughout each month, every two or three days or so, but it’s mostly small stuff.  A browser update runs about 50 meg; a kernel update, about 100. Dunno what all that adds up to over the course of a month. On the Windows machines I maintain, browser updates run smaller (easier to do in-place deltas, I guess), but the Windows 10 cumulative updates have been somewhat over a gigabyte.

Hmm, rambled a bit myself there. Hope this helps. I think I’ll end up quoting this over in the linux subsection…

2 users thanked author for this post.

lizzytish, Elly

zero2dash wrote:

I’m now dual booting Ubuntu MATE with Win7; the only thing I use Windows for is games that haven’t made it to Linux yet. With an SSD, rebooting to switch OS is not a bear like it used to be. As far as I’m concerned, if I get to a point where the Windows partition can be wiped, it will be.

The VirtualBox website has some thinly sketched-out instructions for converting a running Windows partition into a virtual machine image. I’ll be experimenting with that soon, and will report back in the linux subsection of the Lounge.

(There are other VM vendors who have actual conversion utilities, but I kinda like VirtualBox, so I’m trying that first. And of course there are also those 90-day “browser testing” virtual images offered free from Microsoft.)

2 users thanked author for this post.

lizzytish, Elly